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Mac-Talla: Sanas Bathar

Mac-Talla: Sanas Bathar

Posted by Andrew on Monday 1 August 2016
Like most newspapers, each issue of Mac-Talla has a lot of advertisements, and they advertise all sorts of goods and facilities and services. Some of them are quite similar to adverts in the modern day, aside from some old-fashioned language in them, but others are very different and give us an insight into how people’s lives were more than a century ago. This advert from 1892, for example, shows how towns in Cape Breton in Canada were dependent on ships bringing goods to them in the days before supermarkets were everywhere:
 
The steamship “Harlaw” brought the following to
 
COINNEACH R. MAC COINNICH
 
NORTH SYDNEY, C. B.
 
150 barrels of sugar,
250     “      of flour,
100     “      of Oat Meal,
10       “      of Molasses,
100 boxes of Tobacco.
200 chests of Tea from London.
 
Spiced meat, and many other things which cannot be named here. Every person can see for themselves.
 
It’s weird for us to think of a world where we’d need to wait for steamships to bring food and other sundries to us, and to keep in mind the finite number of barrels of each thing, but that’s how people in these places had to live.
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