HERITAGE 2018 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Heritage and Sustainable Development Edited by Rogério Amoêda, Sérgio Lira, Cristina Pinheiro, Juan M. Santiago Zaragoza, Julio Calvo Serrano & Fabián García Carrillo Cover photo: Alhambra, Granada  2018 The Editors and the Authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from the Publisher. e-ISBN 978-84-338-6261-7 Published by Editorial Universidad de Granada Campus Universitario de Cartuja Colegio Máximo, s/n Granada, Spain https://editorial.ugr.es Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development Av. Alcaides de Faria, 377 S.12 4750-106 Barcelos, Portugal mail@greenlines-institute.org http://www.greenlines-institute.org 1st edition, June 2018 Legal Notice The Editors and the Publisher are not responsible for the use which might be made of the following information. Chapter 5: Heritage and culture Burning the ships: the edge of maritime heritage E. Carbonell University of Girona, Girona, Spain ABSTRACT: This paper deals with the loss of maritime heritage. It is important to distinguish between heritage per se and heritage recreations. In the milieu of maritime heritage, we can find few well-preserved original elements, but many recreations. Tangible and intangible heritage of maritime cultures has many serious conservation problems associated with it. First, natural hazards in the marine environment accelerate the degradation of materials. Second, tourism, demographic pressure, and urban growth have led to the disappearance of many elements of coastal heritage. Third, traditional lifestyles linked to maritime crafts, such as traditional shipbuilding, artisanal fishing or coastal trade, have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing due to the ecological crisis and modernity. There is a final element that I would like to highlight in this paper. Heritage understood as a contemporary action is linked to cultural leisure, education, tourism, local development, governance, national identity and sustainability, among other factors, but not to the working world. A vessel is probably the most characteristic element of maritime heritage. But it is, above all, a working tool. The trade was very hard and risky. Here there is a contrast between the vessel as an experience of life and as cultural heritage that we should not forget. What we know today as "maritime heritage", was often abandoned by the communities that lived in it, and has only been recovered by subsequent generations, moved by the nostalgia of a past that they did not really experience. I intend to analyse this question through some specific case studies relating to the disappearance of maritime heritage on the Catalan coast of the Mediterranean and the St Lawrence River estuary in Quebec. 1 INTRODUCTION When I began to work on maritime heritage, around a dozen years ago, the first thing I did was interview elderly people, the oldest I could talk to, who had devoted their lives to the sea. At that time on the Catalan coast, where I had returned after a postdoctoral placement abroad, there was a real fervour of initiatives to recover maritime-fishing heritage. Museums, cultural entities and groups of friends who formed associations to protect local maritime heritage began to restore old boats and the few movable and immovable assets that had withstood the passage of half a century dedicated mainly to tourism on the Mediterranean coast. In addition, many festivals and fairs relating to the sea began to be organized in coastal towns. I had been hired by the Maritime Museum of Barcelona (MMB) to help start maritime ethnology research projects (Garcia, 2007) and my interviews with old fishermen focused mainly on themes such as memories of life (Pujol&Carbonell, 2009) and intangible heritage (Carbonell, 2012). However, in these interviews, I always ended up asking these people, with their faces etched by the sea wind and their penetrating gazes, what they thought about the actions to recover maritime heritage that were taking place on the beaches where they had worked in the past. The response was always a terse smile. Those old fishermen did not understand how people today could exalt 707 HERITAGE 2018 R. Amoêda, S. Lira, C. Pinheiro, J. M. Santiago Zaragoza, J. Calvo Serrano & F. García Carrillo (eds.) sailing or launching from the beach, when the widespread use of motors in fishing boats and the construction of ports in the mid-twentieth century had saved them so much suffering and effort. Years later, thanks to an international mobility grant1, I had the opportunity to complete a three-month research placement in Quebec to study the maritime heritage of the Bas-SaintLaurent region. It is strange how seafarers are similar in distant parts of the world. I interviewed some former captains of the legendary schooners that had transported all the goods up and down the country through the estuary of the Saint Lawrence River, who had learnt the trade from their fathers. They did not feel any kind of nostalgia for that lost world. The schooners, as we will see below, disappeared almost from one day to the next, when land transport was developed in the 1970s. The daughter of a river captain who had been very well-known in his time told me that when she had accompanied her father to an old people’s home after he had become a widower, he requested a room that faced the back of the building, away from the Saint Lawrence River. He did not want to see it any more. Nostalgia emerged in the following generation, the daughter of that captain told me during an interview in a marina where she was stopping over in the modern sailing boat on which she and her husband, both retired, spent their summers, sailing in the broad estuary of the Saint Lawrence River. In this paper, I would like to reflect on the point at which maritime heritage disappears. I will do this using ethnographic data gathered in various studies over these years. The last question addressed in my research is why so little maritime heritage has been conserved, beyond the evident conservation difficulties associated with the coastal environment. 2 MARITIME HERITAGE IN CATALONIA: IS RECREATION THE SAME AS INTANGIBLE HERITAGE? In the first decade of the twenty-first century, at the same time as a certain boom in intangible heritage driven by the declaration of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage of 2003, an increasing interest in intangible maritime heritage could be observed in many countries of the world, in both museographic and academic spheres. Some festivals that are classified as intangible maritime heritage began to be held in coastal towns, organized by local museums and devoted to festive elements. A good example in Catalonia is the “La festa del patrimoni immaterial” (The festival of intangible heritage) (Fig. 1), organized by the Anchovy and Salt Museum (MASLE). The first edition was held in the town of L’Escala on the Costa Brava at the end of the summer in 1997 (Boix, 2004). The festival draws large crowds and offers demonstrations of past trades, gastronomy, music and dances. Figure 1. Performance of past trades during the “FestadelPatrimoni Immaterial” (The festival of intangible heritage) in L’Escala. September 2009. (Photo: E. Carbonell). 708 Chapter 5: Heritage and culture The presence of intangible maritime heritage in academic publications, conferences, and maritime museum programmes is increasingly notable. For example, the International Journal of Intangible Heritage published its first issue in 2006; by the second issue there was already a paper about fishing traditions and intangible heritage (Lanier & Reid, 2007). In 2009, the first International Conference on Intangible Heritage(Sharing Cultures 2009) was held in the Azores, and some contributions to this conference addressed intangible heritage associated with fishing traditions (Akamine, 2009; Cheung, 2009). In 2009, a fishing-related ritual was inscribed for the first time in the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding: the “sanké mon” Malian collective fishing rite. Maritime museums have devoted increasing efforts this century to addressing this issue, in thematic exhibitions and the organization of conferences, round tables or programmes to gather oral memories. This coincides with a general enthusiasm for maritime-fishing heritage, which is beginning to experience a certain “golden age” with the recovery of the few boats and buildings associated with maritime-fishing activities that have survived the pressure of urban development. All this can be related to a change in mentality in the tourist industry with the turn of the century and, above all, the new kind of consumer in this industry: tourists who are increasingly interested in discovering what MacCannell (1976) termed years ago the “backstage” of the tourist setting. We find a growing number of tourists who seek to discover spaces that are not touristy or artificial, that are more real, including the workplaces of inhabitants of the area, such as ports or fishing boats. One clear example is the activity known as “fishing tourism” (Palou, 2017), which has been made possible through certain changes in legislation, and in which tourists can spend a few hours with fishermen on a boat out at sea. The pioneering country in fishing tourism was Italy, which drew up partial legislation that made it possible in 1982, even though the activity did not start to be fully developed until 1999 (Santana & Pascual, 2003). In Spain, it was the autonomous communities that introduced the legislative changes required to develop this activity. One of the first was Catalonia, in Decree 87/2012 on fishing tourism (Molina, 2013:64). In the midst of this general context that was favourable to intangible heritage, considerable interest in heritage associated with the maritime and fishing world could be seen to emerge in Catalonia. This statement is supported by the appearance in Catalonia of a large network of local associations dedicated to conserving maritime heritage, most of which were created from 2007 onwards2. Other European communities with a stronger maritime tradition, such as Brittany or the Netherlands, had recovered and looked after their maritime heritage for a longer time. One of the main European cultural events on traditional boats – perhaps the most important – called “Les Tonnerres de Brest” (France), was first held in 1992. However, in Mediterranean communities such as Catalonia, where the phenomena of coastal tourism that arrived in the 1960s led to a change in economic model that broke dramatically with fishing and subsistence agriculture in the rural world, the traces of maritime culture had been eliminated from the coast at great speed. Even so, from the start of the twenty-first century, a process of raising social awareness began that led to the creation of many maritime heritage associations and the implementation of a range of local initiatives to safeguard the last traces of maritimefishing heritage and culture. This new phenomenon led to the promotion of the PESCUM project (a Spanish acronym of “Ethnological Heritage, Society and Maritime Culture)3 in 2011 by the Chair of Maritime Studies of the University of Girona. The aim of the project was to investigate the scope of the process of heritagization of maritime culture that was taking place at that time. We classified all the activities announced under the title of “maritime heritage” that took place over three years (2011-2013) in the 64 municipalities along the 580 km of Catalan coast4. The data were obtained by web crawling, telephoning town halls, interviewing prominent informants and ethnographic observation.A total of 773 heritagization actions were recorded over three years, from which we can extract the following data in summary form. First, in terms of geographic distribution, the study revealed a higher number of heritagization actions in towns where fishing has a greater presence, such as Palamós, Vilanova, or SantCarles de la Ràpita. Over half of all activities recorded (52% of the total) are related to intangible heritage, followed by movable heritage (33%) and to a lesser extent immovable heritage (8%) and natural heritage (7%). Therefore, we can see that intangible heritage occupies a predominant position in the activities carried out in Catalonia to protect and promote maritime heritage. This substantial difference in 709 HERITAGE 2018 R. Amoêda, S. Lira, C. Pinheiro, J. M. Santiago Zaragoza, J. Calvo Serrano & F. García Carrillo (eds.) the areas of heritage that are involved can be partly explained by the fact that actions on immovable property or natural heritage require major, extremely expensive operations, for example, the restoration of buildings or architectural interventions on the coastal landscape. Hence, few such actions are undertaken. The restoration and maintenance of moveable heritage, including boats, is also costly. Above all, intangible heritage actions predominate because maritime heritage is exploited with a festive, recreational approach that is focused on tourism, organized in the context of local festivals and fairs (food fairs, craft fairs, music festivals and local annual festivals, among others), and town halls’ and local museums’ cultural programmes. All these events involve dramatizations and recreations of activities associated with maritime trades.Therefore, activities relating to the recovery of knowledge and techniques, trades, customs and cuisine play a key role in the heritagization of the maritime environment in Catalonia, although I will question this statement later. Actions relating to traditional boats are also important. They are promoted by cultural associations and local museums and focus on intangible heritage in terms of trades and techniques, as they include demonstrations of systems of launching boats from the beach, demonstrations of sailing manoeuvres using lateen sails, demonstrations with old lifeboats that have been restored, and demonstrations of past trades such as shipwright or caulker. Many of the actions that come under the rubric of intangible heritage can be classified as dramatized recreations of traditional knowledge and techniques. They include historical and ethnographic recreations (for example: sailing wearing period clothing to recreate historical events, recreations of fishing systems that are no longer used, and representations of traditional Dutch-style auctions for selling fish on the beach), demonstrations of trades, often in the context of a fair (for example, construction of fish traps, production and repair of nets, demonstration of sailing knots, etc.) (Fig. 2), workshops, often organized by museums with an educational purpose (lateen sailing, night navigation at sea and boat carpentry workshops, among others). All these recreations or public representations of traditional knowledge and techniques make up most of the actions relating to what we generally call intangible maritime heritage. In contrast, actions relating to surviving customs and beliefs, for example, marine processions in festivals of patron saints (Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Saint Peter), comprise only 8% of the total intangible heritage activities carried out on the Catalan coast. Therefore, only a small proportion of heritage actions refer to the fishermen’s beliefs or religiousness, which we could consider living intangible heritage. Regarding current work techniques, only “fishing-tourism” in small-scale fishing boats could be said to put a heritage value on the work of fishermen. However, this is a very recent activity and not still not practiced widely enough to be able to assess its impact. Figure 2. Demonstration of net making.Festival “Palamós: Terra de Mar” (Sea Land Palamós). May 2013. (Photo: EliseuCarbonell). 710 Chapter 5: Heritage and culture In conclusion, most of the maritime heritage initiatives that take place in Catalonia are in the area of intangible heritage. Within this group, most actions are recreations of traditional activities for educational, leisure or museum purposes as part of marine festivals or local annual festivals. However, can we maintain that an activity such as a food fair dedicated to cooking fish, a performance by a group playing maritime folk music on stage, or a demonstration of past maritime trades as part of a fair held on the promenade of a coastal town, next to stalls selling handicrafts, can really be considered elements of intangible heritage? If we take the definition given in the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage of 2003, it is questionable. The spirit of the convention was to value and preserve intangible cultural elements such as traditional festivals, rituals, knowledge of the environment and traditional crafts techniques that are conserved and transmitted from generation to generation. We should question whether it is consistent to include within the catalogue of intangible heritage the recreation in festivals or museums of an intangible culture that had a break in transmission for one or two generations. In my interviews with old fishermen and in ethnographic observations that I carried out during many maritime festivals, listening above all to the opinions of older people who had experienced the world of fishing prior to the mass influx of tourism in the 1960s and 1970s, I always found evidence of the great distance separating these people’s life experiences and the heritage recreations. I will give just one example. In most of the coastal towns of Catalonia, fishing operated from the beach until the fishing ports were built well into the twentieth century. Some coastal towns still did not have a port during the entire twentieth century, and had to continue to operate their fishing boats from the beach. Launching a heavy fishing boat from the beach to the sea, at dawn, with four or five men pushing with their shoulders and their bare feet dug into the sand, and then getting the vessel back out of the sea and up the beach when they returned in the afternoon, tired after a day’s fishing, using the strength of their arms and the help of horses, oxen or mechanical engines from the 1930s onwards, was a hard, difficult, risky operation. It required skill and experience, as well as perfect coordination between the men carrying it out, as one mistake could lead to an accident with grave consequences. When the sea was a little rough the risks increased considerably. When there was a sea storm it was impossible to launch. But if a storm started unexpectedly when the boats were out fishing, they had to get back quickly, and onto the beach however they could. In this situation, the risk of an accident was very high. People still remember the storm of 31 January 1911 when 140 fishermen died on the coasts of Barcelona and Tarragona because they were surprised by a major storm that had not given any of the warning signs that the fishermen knew well and could interpret by observing the state of the sky (Carbonell, 2014). There are no longer any professional fishing boats operating from the beach. Tourism uses of the beaches gained ground over fishing uses, and the boats had to be moved to the ports, where the fishermen had to travel every day from their homes. In recent years, fishing boats have begun to reappear on Catalan beaches, but they are restored boats or replicas of old vessels that have been built recently. One example is the “llagut” Santa Espina, which is ten metres long and was built in 1928 in Banyuls de la Marenda in North Catalonia, in the south of France. The Santa Espina, like other traditional boats on the Catalan coast that have been built or restored in recent years, as part of the aforementioned “Catalan Federation for Maritime and River Culture and Heritage”, is taken to many meetings throughout the year, where it is sometimes used in demonstrations of launching boats from the beach. One of these occasions is the maritime festival “Firamar” that is held on the third weekend of August every year in Sant Pol de Mar (Barcelona). Firamar is attended by many boats from different towns, which come together for the fair to be exhibited to the public. One of the activities that arouses the most public interest is launching the boats from the beach. As shown in Figure 3, today the collaboration of many people is required to get the boat into the water. Older people who were fishermen and worked all their lives on the beach look on with a mixture of surprise and irony. Their comments indicate that they do not understand why people today to have fun or entertain themselves do things that they had to do for work. They also make ironic comments about how many backs are needed to complete, in a clumsy, bungling way, what they did every day, summer and winter, with just a small group of men on a beach occupied only by small groups of fishermen working, with nobody watching them. 711 HERITAGE 2018 R. Amoêda, S. Lira, C. Pinheiro, J. M. Santiago Zaragoza, J. Calvo Serrano & F. García Carrillo (eds.) Figure 3. Launching the “llagut” Santa Espina on the beach of Sant Pol de Mar in summer 2007 (Photo: E. Carbonell). 3 MARITIME HERITAGE IN QUEBEC: MATERIAL HERITAGE ADRIFT? In Quebec, as in Catalonia, we also find a wide range of activities in which intangible maritime heritage is recreated. Many are designed to celebrate French-Canadian identity, for example, the great New France Festival that is held in August in the city of Quebec to celebrate the arrival of French settlers to the continent (Fig. 4). Several festivals that are more oriented towards local tourism are also focused on intangible maritime heritage, including the “Fête des chants de marins” (Sea Shanty Festival) that is also held in August in the town of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli. However, this section is not centred on intangible heritage, but on a paradigmatic aspect of maritime heritage in general: the boats, specifically, the schooners (goélettes, in French) of the Saint Lawrence River. Figure 4. Fêtes de la Nouvelle-France (New France Festival) in the city of Quebec. August 2015. (Photo: E. Carbonell). 712 Chapter 5: Heritage and culture I will start by recounting a sad event. Once evening in February 2015, the schooner “M.P. Émilie”, weighing 300 tonnes and with a length of 33.5 metres, defined by specialists as a “work of art of maritime architecture”5, burnt on the ice covering the banks of the Saint Lawrence River in Baie-St-Paul, in the Quebec region of Charlevoix, just opposite the Isle-auxCoudres where the schooner had been constructed in 1957 by the shipwright Paul Mailloux on behalf of captain ÉloiPerron. According to the police, the fire was caused by vandalism when someone tried to wrench the metal parts from the ship. The schooner stopped sailing in 1974, at the end of the era of schooners that had previously dominated the river trade along the Saint Lawrence. Two years later, the boat was bought by Guy Paquet, a painter with some recognition in Quebec, who transformed her into his studio and home, and rechristened her “L’Accalmie”. However, deterioration caused by the passage of time and the region’s extreme climate forced Paquet to abandon the boat a few metres from where she had last sailed, until in 2007 a craftsman bought her with the aim of restoring her. “C’est comme une mission”, hereplied to a journalist’s questions, “Je suis devenu un peu le gardien du patrimoine maritime de Baie-SaintPaul”6.However, despite all his efforts, he could not raise the money needed for the restoration, and this is how the boat reached her sad ending. Journalists stressed that “one of the most painted and most photographed schooners in the country” had disappeared; an aesthetic interest that had not saved her from her fate on a bonfire. In its Quebec edition, the Huffington Post published images by a photographer from Montreal, who had by chance been there just a few days before the fire to photograph for a couple of hours, at 30 degrees below zero, “all the splendour of the schooner L’Accalmie”7. What the journalists did not say is that in the pyre a tool of work disappeared and, fleetingly, if I may make a rather bold statement, a masterpiece of intangible heritage appeared. Let me explain: the fire that envelops and consumes an artefact (sometimes a very intricate and beautiful artefact, such as the Fallas of Valencia which are inscribed in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO) constitutes the act in which intangible heritage is expressed in its most radical form, as the fire destroys the tangible and opens the door to the intangible. In fact, according to the definition of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage, many festive rituals include bonfires as a key element. In the area of maritime heritage, an interesting case was studied by Božaniü and Buljubašiü (2012) in Croatia. According to the paper, which was published in the International Journal of Intangible Heritage, around the winter solstice on the Island of Vis in the Adriatic Sea, an old, disused wooden boat is selected every year to be burnt on the night of Saint Nicholas (6 December); the patron saint of certain fishing communities, along with Saint Peter and Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Some of the boats burned in the festival of Saint Nicholas are over a hundred years old. They are an item of tangible heritage that is sacrificed for the sake of a religious festival, that is, intangible heritage. It is not the only documented case. During the summer solstice, a similar ritual takes place as part of the Saint John’s Eve festival in Palmeira, which belongs to the municipality of Ribeira in A Coruña; and during the festival of Saint Peter in Montijo, in the Lisbon area, with the traditional Queima do Batelthat coincides with the firework display during the Encerramento das Festas. Other boat burnings, in this case enveloped in bitter controversy, take place on the island of Mallorca, in bonfires made to celebrate the fiestas of Saint Anthony during January8. I am not aware of any solstice bonfires made with boats in Quebec, but the end of the schooner M.P. Émilie could also be interpreted in ritual terms due to the abandonment of this treasure of maritime heritage. Here, a statement made by David Harvey (2001: 320) about the temporality of heritage is relevant: “Every society has had a relationship with its past, even those which have chosen to ignore it”. When I read in the press the sad news about the burning of the M.P. Émlie, I recalled that during an interview in Quebec with the daughter of schooner captain Jean Claude Tremblay, born in Tadoussac in 1904, she told me that when her father became a widow and went to live in an old people’s home, he expressly asked for a room that faced away from the river: “It’s as if he’d moved on to something else (…) I think that it’s a very hard trade … the nostalgia comes more from later generations. From the outside, it seems pleasant, but it wasn’t, it was hard”9. 713 HERITAGE 2018 R. Amoêda, S. Lira, C. Pinheiro, J. M. Santiago Zaragoza, J. Calvo Serrano & F. García Carrillo (eds.) Paradoxically, although Quebec is one of the leading places worldwide in museography and heritage, for some reason it chose to overlook – or almost totally overlook – the singular, unique floating heritage of the schooners built in wood by brilliant craftsmen, by eye, with no plans and only quite simple tools. Out of almost 500 schooners constructed between 1860 and 1960 (Boucher, 2010:58), only one still sails today: the Grosse-Ile built in 1951 (Fig. 5). Her captain is not even from Quebec, but a Belgian citizen who emigrated to Canada in 1969 and took on the saving of the schooner as a personal project and battle. This put him in considerable debt with the banks; a debt he can scarcely pay off by taking tourists around the city of Quebec on his schooner in the summer, or by hiring the boat out for events. In the Charlevoix Maritime Museum, two schooners, the Jean Yvan and the Saint-André, have been conserved out of the water and converted into exhibition rooms, after restorations that were seriously questioned by specialists. A third sailing schooner, the Marie-Clarisse, was built in 1923 and declared cultural property in 1978. However, Alain Frank10, one of the main specialists in maritime heritage in Quebec, told me in an interview that it was a mistake to give the schooner this legal status as it was built in Nova Scotia and bears no relation to the maritime heritage of Quebec. Figure 5. The schooner Grosse-Ile in the port of Quebec City. (Photo: E. Carbonell). The “Goélette” is a type of boat designed by French-Canadians and adapted for coastal trade along the Saint Lawrence River, the main and almost only route of communication between distant towns until the 1970s. With the introduction of steam power and the industrialization of the country at the end of the nineteenth century, the number of schooners multiplied. In 1900, there were a hundred schooners (Tondreau, 1982) transporting between towns on the river banks staples and all other kinds of materials, particularly trees felled for sawmills and papermills. The schooners formed part of the landscape of the country’s daily life. They were built in many small-scale shipyards on the banks of the river. The river could only be sailed half the year, as it freezes over in the winter. The schooners were known popularly as “les voituresd’eau”. In general, they were family businesses. The owner was the captain and the crew were often 714 Chapter 5: Heritage and culture comprised of close family members, including the wife and small children until school age, as I was told in some testimonies. In the 1950s, steel began to be introduced in the construction of these boats, which made them more expensive and presaged their end. Indeed, the evolution of land transport brought a very abrupt end to the schooners in the 1970s, which coincided with major changes in Quebec society with the “Quiet Revolution” that would be experienced by Quebecers as a true process of decolonization. On his boat one day, the captain of the Grosse-Ile told me: “the world of the schooners has disappeared because the French Canadians were the ‘black whites’ and people don’t want to remember poverty”11. Since the 1980s in Quebec, SOSs have been sent by some specialists through publications on heritage, such as the specialized heritage journal Continuité. They have warned of the “loss of the national fleet” in reference to the schooners and have described the situation of this heritage as “the shipwreck of maritime culture” (Martin, 1984) or as “heritage adrift” (Frank, 2008), to use the expressions of the Quebec specialists themselves. In the same period, the globally admired Museum of Civilization in Quebec was planned and built on the former port of the French-Canadian capital. During the museum building works, archeological remains were found of a ship wrecked at the time of the colony. This ship is now exhibited in the hall of the museum after a costly restoration (Bergeron &Laroche, 1985). Meanwhile, along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River lay dozens of abandoned schooners, such as the M.P. Émilie. These boats were slowly rotting as the specialists’ warnings came to nothing, beyond painting and photographing the schooners so that the nostalgic could remember “les bon vieux temps”. However, as we have seen, in the memories of those who experienced the era of the schooners, the survivors and their children, those times were not so good. In fact, they were hard times. Sailing on the river was not easy, and shipwrecks were frequent due to the hazards of sailing and the pressure of delivering goods on time. The daughter of captain Tremblay, who I referred to previously, told me that when she was a little girl, she had to be saved in her mother’s arms one night during a shipwreck. There was pressure to arrive on time to receive payment for the shipment. A delayed delivery could mean the loss of the journey. The paper mills, the industry, and the salmon fishing rights, among other aspects, all belonged to English Canadians. French Canadians worked in boat transport and agriculture: it was a relationship of rich and poor. Working on the schooners was not a very lucrative business and it involved considerable risk due to the reefs. It took four days to unload the goods; tree trunks were thrown one by one over the edge of the schooners and then loaded onto lorries that took them to the sawmill or mill. The ethnologist and writer Alain Boucher, who was the first curator of the Charlevoix Maritime Museum, told me during an interview at his home that this world needed to disappear for modern Quebec to emerge, with true control of the river by the French Canadians, and that the economy of a modern country could not be based on this kind of transport12. It was rather a surprising statement coming from a former museum curator, but anyway it was an idea that made me think. Another ethnologist, Alain Frank, who is still the curator of the Maritime Museum of Quebec, situated in the town of L’Islet one hundred kilometres from the capital, told me during an interview at the museum itself: “People have lived in poverty, the boats remind them of that period, that’s why there’s no interest in preserving them”. In the 1980s, there were around thirty boats abandoned on the banks of the river, which aroused a mixture of nostalgia and a sensation of danger, according to Frank. He believes that there was wishful thinking that they would be conserved like that forever. With no grants from federal or regional government, some towns tried individually to save some of those schooners, but to no avail. While how to save them was being discussed, the schooners rotted, stated Alain Frank. Or they were looted or burnt, like the M.P. Émilie. Heritagization processes basically involve a change in value. When a boat is no longer used for fishing or for transporting goods and becomes a heritage asset its economic value changes, due to its singularity, uniqueness, age, rarity and beauty. This happens with old houses, industrial buildings, items of period furniture or even coffee spoons, according to Nathalie Heinich (2009). However, other values of the item also change, including its sentimental worth and its identity value, that is, what it means for the inhabitants of a country in a certain era. The abandonment of the schooners, leaving them to rot on the river banks, and the bonfire as a final ritual event also involve a change in value to explore, a value for that specific society, as 715 HERITAGE 2018 R. Amoêda, S. Lira, C. Pinheiro, J. M. Santiago Zaragoza, J. Calvo Serrano & F. García Carrillo (eds.) the destruction of heritage also forms part of heritagization processes and can tell us a lot about the society. 4 FINAL REFLECTIONS Catalonia and Quebec are two different, very distant places, with clearly differentiated climate, landscape and maritime tradition. However, they are also similar in some aspects of political and social history. Recently, a doctoral thesis was published at the University of Girona that examines in depth the parallelisms between civil society, popular culture and nationalism in both places (Girori, 2017). There are also some similarities and, of course, differences at the level of maritime heritage. As in other places in the western world, maritime culture is fading, and traditional maritime trades disappeared or were radically transformed during the 1970s. This coincides with a historical period in which the “Quiet Revolution” occurred in Quebec and the “Democratic Transition” in Catalonia. These historical events led to major social transformations, modernization and social and economic progress. The past was left behind, and traditional societies with their positive and negative aspects vanished rapidly. The nostalgia that generally stimulates the recovery of heritage did not appear until one or two generations later. Another important detail to consider, which I have not been able to analyse in this paper due to lack of space, is the relevance of cultural tourism to Quebec in the context of North America, which is similar to its relevance in Catalonia in the context of the western Mediterranean. Last but not least, as stated by Richard Handler (1988), cultural heritage is an essential element in the construction of national identity in Quebec, as it is in Catalonia (Kammerer, 2014; Vaczi, 2016). It is not the aim of this paper to examine these issues in the depth they require, but I am struck by the fact that, in addition to the above similarities, in these two places where heritage plays such a key role, maritime heritage was not kept alive. However, after one or two generations had passed, intangible heritage that had been erased by time was recreated. Raymond Williams (1975) defended the argument that a field in active production could never be considered a landscape. If we make an analogy, we could state that a boat is not traditional until it is no longer used to transport people and goods or to go fishing. Tradition, as the US anthropologist Richard Wilk (1988) stated, is “a persuasive fiction that serves practical uses in day to day life”. He said that in periods of relative economic and ecological stability, tradition is of little interest. However, in contrast, in times of instability, when the social order is at risk, the past gains importance and meaning. Currently, coastal areas are under pressure from many quarters: tourism, urban development, demography and environment, among others. This is a typical characteristic of the globalization that we are experiencing. Responses at local level include a nostalgic, romantic search for a lost identity through heritage, for a search through heritage for a romanticised heritage13, as Christopher Tilley explains (2006:14). However, those who have experienced the culture, the maritime culture, do not always participate in or understand these processes of converting the past into heritage. I consider that we should not delude ourselves by classifying heritage recreations as real maritime heritage. This is what I have tried to express in this paper, to respond from an anthropological perspective. Putting aside considerations that are more appropriate for conservation experts, to date neither tangible nor intangible maritime heritage has been preserved in Catalonia and Quebec. It is likely that this scheme of interpretation could apply to other places in the world. ENDNOTES 1 2 Project: “La patrimonización del ámbito costero en la región del Bas-St-Laurent (Quebec, Canada)” (Theheritagization of thecoastalarea in the Bas-St Laurent región [Quebec, Canada]). "José Castillejo" International Mobility Programme, Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, Government of Spain. 01/06/2015 to 31/08/2015. The “Federaciócatalana per la culturai el patrimoniimarítimi fluvial” (Catalan Federation for Maritime and River Culture and Heritage) brings together ten associations distributed along the coast, although other associations exist that are not members of the Federation. Most of the associations date from 716 Chapter 5: Heritage and culture after 2007, though some were founded longer ago. See: http://fccpmf.blogspot.com.es/ [accessed on: 22/03/2018]. PESCUM: R&D&I project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Ref.: HAR201015566. 4 The PESCUM project also gathered the same data in three other autonomous communities of the Spanish state: Galicia, the Basque Country and Andalusia. However, in this paper we focus exclusively on Catalonia. 5 According to the professor emeritus of the UQAM Robert Desjardins, a specialist in schooners of the Saint Lawrence River.See: “Centre collégial de développement de matériel didactique (CCDMD); Le monde en images; Les voitures d’eau sur le Saint-Laurent”. http://monde.ccdmd.qc.ca/ressource/?id=50514&demande=desc (Accessed on: 25/08/2016) 6 TVA: “Baie-Saint-Paul.Dernière année pour sauver L'Accalmie” http://cimt.teleinterrives.com/nouvelleRegional_Derniere_annee_pour_sauver_L_Accalmie-87 (Accessed on: 24/08/2016). 7 Radio Canada: “La goélette de Baie-Saint-Paul détruite par un incendie” http://ici.radiocanada.ca/regions/quebec/2015/02/18/008-accalmie-goelette-plus-photographiee-peinte-detruiteincendie.shtml (Accessed on: 24/08/2016). 8 The Huffington Post: “baie saint-paul: la goelette l'accalmie, la plus photographiee et la plus peinte, detruite par un incendie” http://quebec.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/02/19/la-golette-la-plusphoto_n_6710238.html (Accessed on: 24/08/2016). 1) See: dBalears.cat (19/01/2002) “Elsveïns del Molinar cremen un llaüt i un botmallorquí al fogueró. ElsAmics del MuseuMarítim denunciaren elsfets a la Guàrdia Civil”. http://dbalears.cat/actualitat/Balears/els-veins-del-molinar-cremen-un-l (Accessed: 04/03/2014); Diario de Mallorca (24/01/2014): “El sector náutico balear urge la creación del Museo Marítimo tras la quema de un llaüt en un fogueró” http://www.diarioderegatas.es/index.php?contenido_servicio_tabla=template_noticia_detalle&idnotici a=2862&col2_categoria=8 (Accessed: 26/08/2014). 9 Interview with Margot Trembaly, 8 July 2015. Rimouski Marina (QC). 10 Interview with Alain Frank, curator of the Maritime Museum of Quebec.L’Islet, 24 August 2015. 11 Interview with the captain of the schooner Grosse-Ile, 25 August 2015.Port of the city of Quebec. 12 Alain Boucher, personal communication. Quebec, 22 July 2015. 13 I have discussed this issue in another paper. See: Carbonell (2010). 3 REFERENCES Akamine, J. 2009. “The politics of seacucumberfoodways heritage: Fishery network and marine resources conservation in Japan”. In S. 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