My father's family came to Newfoundland as fishers (via France via Ireland) in 1632 - it was a horrific hard life.... Lawn, Placentia Bay-

Lifestyle of Fishers, 1600-1900- NEWFOUNDLAND

European fishers had been working off Newfoundland and Labrador's coasts for about 100 years by the turn of the 17th century. Most arrived by May or June to exploit abundant cod stocks before returning overseas in the late summer or early fall. Known as the transatlantic migratory fishery, the enterprise prospered until the early 19th century when it gave way to a resident industry.

St. John's, NL, 1786

“A View of St. John's and Fort Townsend.” Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada (R5434 C-002545).

As the number of permanent settlers at Newfoundland and Labrador increased throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the lifestyles of workers engaged in the fishery changed. The household became an important part of the industry because resident fishers were increasingly able to rely on relatives for assistance instead of on hired hands. At the same time, the emergence of the seal hunt and other winter industries allowed fishers to diversify into other sectors and work year-round. A growing resident population also led to dramatic social and political changes, giving fishers and their families access to schools, churches, hospitals, poor relief, and many other services and institutions.
Despite these developments, many similarities remained between fishers in the 19th century and their 17th-century counterparts. Handlines, small open boats, and other gear remained largely unchanged since the days of the migratory fishery, as did the basic techniques of salting and drying fish. Inshore fishers of both the 17th and 19th centuries lived in coastal areas that were close to cod stocks, and they rowed to fishing grounds each morning before returning home in the evening or night.

Migratory Fishery

The migratory fishery was a seasonal industry that required most of its workers to live in Newfoundland and Labrador on a temporary basis only, usually during the spring and summer when cod were plentiful in offshore waters. France, Spain, and Portugal participated in the early migratory fishery, but it was England that eventually dominated the industry, each year dispatching shiploads of fishers from its West Country ports.

Bristol, England, 1787

England's West Country eventually dominated Newfoundland and Labrador's early migratory fishery.

Painting by Nicholas Pocock. From Stanley Hutton, Bristol and its Famous Associations (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1907) 21.

Despite the dangers and expenses associated with annually sending thousands of men across the Atlantic, British fish merchants and government officials did not initially want to establish year-round settlements at Newfoundland and Labrador. The region had limited agricultural potential and offered few opportunities for winter work, which meant the state would likely have to spend large sums of money supporting colonists. Fish merchants also feared a resident industry would interfere with their profits from the lucrative cod trade.
As a result, most fishers working at Newfoundland and Labrador in the 17th and 18th centuries were not permanent residents. They instead travelled across the Atlantic each year in large ocean-going vessels and spent only a few months overseas before returning west in the late summer or early fall. During this time, the vast majority of fishing people were separated from their families and their homes. Most were in the employ of West Country merchants, who traded goods and credit to fishers in return for cod; the merchants then sold the fish to domestic and foreign buyers.

Lifestyle of Migratory Fishers

While at Newfoundland and Labrador, the lifestyles of migratory fishers revolved around their occupation; workers spent most of their waking hours catching and curing fish, which left them with little leisure time. Immediately after arriving in the spring or early summer, workers had to first spend much time and energy cutting timber and building the infrastructure of the fishery: stages, which fishers used to tie up their boats and unload their catch; flakes, where fishers laid out their cod to dry; and cabins, cookrooms, and other structures where workers slept, ate, and retreated for shelter. Workers built camps in coastal areas that would ensure easy access to productive fishing grounds.
After the construction phase was completed, fishers spent the remainder of their time at Newfoundland and Labrador catching cod and processing it for sale. Workers rowed to fishing grounds in small open boats early each morning and returned to shore when their vessels were filled with cod. The men fished with long handlines – sometimes up to 55 metres long – that had a hook attached to one end. Fishers baited the hook with squid or capelin, dropped it in the water, and repeatedly pulled the line up and down to attract cod, often having to re-bait the hook.

Fish Hook, ca. 1675

Migratory fishers at Newfoundland and Labrador caught cod with long handlines that had a small iron hook (like the one shown here) attached to one end. Fishers baited the hook with squid or capelin, dropped it in the water, and repeatedly pulled the line up and down to attract cod.

Courtesy of the Department of Archaeology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL.

Once fishers unloaded their catch onto the stage, members of the shore crew processed it. Headers removed the cod's head and guts; splitters cut out the backbone, and salters covered the fish with salt for curing. Next, workers spread the fish out on flakes or beaches to dry in the sun and air. The drying process could take weeks and workers had to regularly turn the fish to ensure even drying; they also had to cover the product or bring it inside whenever it rained. The shore crew's work was of vital importance, as the quality of cure often determined how much money cod would fetch at the market.
Labourers in the migratory fishery worked long hours – often from daybreak until dusk. Whatever leisure time they had was likely spent with colleagues, as most men were separated from their families and lived in makeshift cabins. Storytelling and music may have been popular pastimes that would have allowed many people in the group to take part. Fishers also met at the local smithy each evening to drink, smoke, and socialize. Blacksmiths existed in many harbours during the 17th century to repair and manufacture boat fixings and other metal items. Their workplaces, known as smithies or forges, were much warmer than most other local structures and often doubled as taverns in the evenings. Archaeologists at Ferryland have uncovered a wide range of clay pipes and ceramic drinking vessels in a local 17th-century smithy which indicate that structure also served as a cookroom and tavern.

Resident Fishery

The lifestyle of fishers remained largely unchanged until the migratory fishery gave way to a resident industry in the early 1800s. The number of permanent settlers at Newfoundland and Labrador gradually increased during the 17th and 18th centuries for a variety of reasons. Planters and merchants hired caretakers to overwinter on the island and guard fishing gear; wars sometimes made it difficult for people to cross the Atlantic and return home; and the emergence of proprietary colonies in the 1600s helped create a foundation for permanent settlement. The Irish and English women who began to come to Newfoundland and Labrador in greater numbers during the 1700s, often to work as servants for resident planters, were crucial to settlement. Many married migratory fishers or male servants and settled on the island to raise families.
The Napoleonic and Anglo-American wars of the early 1800s also did much to turn Newfoundland and Labrador's inshore fishery into a resident industry. As the French and American fisheries declined between 1804 and 1815, Newfoundland and Labrador cod became more valuable on the international market. This prompted many English and Irish fishers to permanently settle on the island instead of traveling there each summer to fish.
Instead of the large-scale fishing operations of the migratory fishery, which were directed by merchants and involved sizeable boat and shore crews, smaller household operations, largely relying on family labour, underpinned the resident fishery. Women and children assumed much of the work formerly done by headers, splitters, and salters, while men and older boys harvested cod. Fishers continued to use handlines throughout the 1800s, although some used more efficient gear, including cod seines, trawl lines, gillnets, and cod traps.
Otherwise, the nature of the inshore fishery remained largely unchanged. Fishers left their coastal homes early each morning to row or sail to nearby fishing grounds and returned when their boats were filled with cod. The shore crew split, salted, and dried the fish. One day each week was also devoted to catching bait – usually squid and capelin. As in the migratory fishery, fishing people traded their catch to merchants for food and supplies, or for credit in the merchant's stores. Instead of dealing with West Country firms, many 19th-century fishers worked for merchants based in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Some resident fishers also participated in the Labrador and bank fisheries. The former grew in popularity when some of the island's inshore cod stocks showed signs of depletion after 1815, prompting fishers to migrate to Labrador each summer and fish there. The Labrador fishery consisted of two groups: stationers and floaters. Islanders who set up living quarters on shore and fished each day in small boats were known as stationers, while floaters lived on board their vessels and sailed up and down the Labrador coast, often journeying further north than stationers.

Schooners on the Grand Banks, 1894

Newfoundland and Labrador residents were engaged in the offshore banks fishery by the 1860s.

Pencil drawing by Henry Ash. “Schooners cod fishing on the Great Bank of Newfoundland.” Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada (00056).

Permanent residents also engaged in the offshore banks fishery by the 1860s, in part to compensate for declining inshore stocks. This industry typically ran from March until October, although the fishing season could vary from one community to another. Wooden schooners, sealing steamers, and other ocean-going vessels made three or four trips to the banks each season and often remained there for weeks before returning home. Women and children did not participate in this industry, as fishers often cured their catch at sea.

Other Activities

To support themselves and their families throughout the year, many resident fishing people engaged in a wide range of economic activities during the 19th century. These included hunting game and trapping furs in the fall and winter; woodcutting in the winter; sealing in the winter and spring; and fishing, farming, and berry picking in the spring, summer, and early fall. Many families spent the warmer months near the shore to harvest fish and other coastal resources, before moving further inland during the fall and winter to cut timber and hunt game. Private vegetable gardens were also common in many rural communities. Most households grew crops that were easy to care for, preserved well, and were compatible with Newfoundland and Labrador's poor soil and cold climate. Cabbages were popular, alongside a variety of root vegetables, including potatoes, turnip, carrots, parsnip, beets, and onions.
Better-developed social and political services also emerged during the 1800s to support a growing resident population. By the end of the century, many fishing people and their families had access to schools, doctors, nurses, churches and other services. The colony acquired much greater political autonomy, with the inauguration of Representative Government in 1832 and Responsible Government in 1855, and supported its own print media after 1807. Better modes of communication and transportation – including steamers, the railway, and the telegraph – also connected the Newfoundland and Labrador people to each other and the rest of the world on an unprecedented scale.
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Video: A Settler's Life in Newfoundland and Labrador 1780-1840

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A Settler's Life in Newfoundland and Labrador 1780-1840

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http://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/fishers-lifestyle.php

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Colonization and Settlement: 1600-1830

The Early Settling of Newfoundland

European fishermen were lured by the fishery to Newfoundland since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Yet their presence was required only for a few months of the year; the fishing population was a migratory or seasonal one, returning to homelands in Europe at the end of each fishing season. It was therefore a standard assumption among historians that attempts to colonize the island early in the seventeenth century were not successful, and that a resident population emerged only in the late sevententh century. The seemingly slow rate of growth and development was explained by historians as a consequence of a fundamental hostility between the needs of a migratory fisherman for free access to beaches and shore resources and the needs of the settler for permanent occupation of property. Reinforcing this argument was the claim that the state persistently declared settlement to be forbidden and attempted to prevent permanent settlement in favour of a purely seasonal fishery based on a migratory labour force. Only recently has this “illegal settlement” paradigm been recognized as an historical myth and displaced by a recognition that the growth of a permanent population in Newfoundland not only began much earlier than the late seventeenth century but was always intimately linked to the fishery. Indeed, permanent settlement had its greatest success wherever merchants and traders had established themselves. enth and early eighteenth century. In this regard, a very useful essay to examine is “Historical Fence-building: a critique of the historiography of Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Quarterly LXXIV (Spring 1978): 21-30 by Keith Matthews; it has since been reprinted with annotations and corrections in Newfoundland Studies XVII: 2 (Fall 2001): 143-165.

Peter Pope has since developed sophisticated arguments which convincingly link the fishery and settlement. Basically, Newfoundland reversed the usual pattern in the early history of North America. Where mainland colonies were shaped by an abundance of land and a shortage of labour, the Newfoundland fisheries had no shortage of labour but strong competition for limited beach space needed to "make" or cure fish. This led to strategies that encouraged over-wintering and concentration by Europeans from the same home districts. Pope developed these arguments in a number of articles. See for example "The European Occupation of Southeast Newfoundland: Archaeological Perspectives on Competition for Fishing Rooms, 1530-1680," in Christian Roy, Jean Bélisle, Marc-André Bernier, and Brad Loewen (eds.), ArchéoLogiques; Collection Hors-Série 1. Mer et Monde: Questions d’archéologie maritime (Québec: Association des archéologiques du Québec, 2003), pp. 122-133; and "Transformation of the Maritime Cultural Landscape of Atlantic Canada by Migratory European Fishermen, 1500-1800," in Louis Sicking and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (eds.), Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900-1850 (The Hague: Brill, 2008), 123-154. More recently, Pope suggests that innovations in the material culture of ordinary European families appear to have played a critical role in the transition from sixteenth-century seasonal European installations in North America and the flurry of permanent settlements in the early seventeenth century; see “The Consumer Revolution of the Late 16th Century and the European Domestication of North America,” in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 37-47. Finally, in “The English and the Irish in Newfoundland: Historical Archaeology and the Myth of Illegal Settlement,” in Audrey Horning and Nick Brannon (eds.), Ireland and Britain in the Atlantic World (Dublin: Wordwell Books, 2009), pp. 217-234, Pope makes a compelling case which explains how substantial archaeological evidence compiled in recent decades supports the conclusion that in Newfoundland, a European presence can be detected as far back as the temporary cabins installed by the sixteenth-century migratory fishery, followed by the establishment of a number of permanent communities at various moments in the seventeenth century. Though considerable attention continues to be given to proprietary, corporate, and state colonies such as Ferryland, Cupid’s, and Placentia, the fact is that much of the population growth of the seventeenth-century Newfoundland was a consequence of informal settlement. By 1677, there were close to 2,000 people living on the English Shore alone, with many more in French parts of the island. In short, the notion that settlement was always held to be illegal, or that the fishery was a determined foe of settlement, has been thoroughly discredited, although the power of those myths remains persistent, so that our emerging understanding of Newfoundland’s Early Modern settlement history still seems to come as something of a surprise to many Newfoundlanders today.

Pope brings many of his ideas and arguments on the early settlement of Newfoundland together in Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Here he shows that the proprietary and corporate colonies of the early seventeenth century were more successful than hitherto suspected at establishing permanent settlement in Newfoundland (see below), and that the rate of growth was in fact not significantly worse than it was for other European colonies in the region, such as Acadia. Indeed, it has been argued that if we limit our assessment of settlement just to that coastal strip known as “the English Shore,” then the density of occupation of usable land by the early eighteenth century may in fact have been very high, and quite comparable or even greater than elsewhere in English North America; see Andrew Rolfson, Land Tenure, Landowners, and Servitude on the Early-Eighteenth Century English Shore (M.A. research paper, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2004).

Yet the perception that early settlers lived lives of desperation and hardship, and that Newfoundland was "a wild place largely unsuited for civilised activity," persists. The quotation comes from an article by David N. Collins, "Foe, Friend and Fragility: Evolving Settler Interactions with the Newfoundland Wilderness," which appeared in the British Journal of Canadian Studies XXI: 1 (2008), pp. 35-62. Collins endorses Gillian Cell’s view that the years of colonization efforts between 1610 and the 1630s were "years of disillusionment." Significantly, none of Peter Pope’s publications appear in the list of references used by Collins. This is not to deny (as we shall see below) that settlement in Newfoundland was difficult, only that the traditional perception that colonization was unfruitful must be overturned. Certainly the fragility of indigenous populations, together with the experience of English and French colonists, to which we can also add the difficulties experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in diversifying the economy, have collectively fostered a stronger appreciation for limiting factors related to environmental conditions. Yet scholarly interest into the relationship between the human history of Newfoundland and environmental conditions is only now beginning to attract focussed attention. One example of the way in which human habitation has affected the natural environment is a recent study by Joyce Brown Macpherson, “The Vegetational History of St. John’s,” in Alan G. Macpherson (ed.), Four Centuries and the City: Perspectives on the Historical Geography of St. John’s (St. John’s: Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2005), pp. 19-36. However, it is more typically the effect of the natural environment on human habitation and activities in the fishery and trade that attracts the attention of historians.

Towards this end, and the better to understand the several attempts to colonize Newfoundland in the seventeenth century, it would probably be wise to begin with some readings that provide insight into the motivations and assumptions underpinning overseas European colonization efforts generally, and more specifically, European perceptions of the opportunities that Newfoundland seemed to offer in particular. Closely related to this, we should also understand the way in which Newfoundland’s climatic and physical attributes were perceived. Begin with Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625 (London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), in which Andrew Fitzmaurice explores the motivations and inspirations behind English expansion and the idea of overseas colonization in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Newfoundland. Though he discusses such traditional themes as the motivations of wealth and profit, honour and glory, he also examines the nature of and possibilities for liberty, and the problems of just title. Follow this with David Quinn’s essay, “Newfoundland in the Consciousness of Europe in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” in George M. Story (ed.), Early European Settlement and Exploitation in Atlantic Canada (St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1982), pp. 9-30, as well as Mary C. Fuller’s essay, “Images of English Origins in Newfoundland and Roanoke,” in Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (eds.), Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 141-158. Then turn to the essay by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience," William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XLI: 2(April 1984), pp. 213-40 (see especially pp. 213-217). While Kupperman does not concentrate specifically on Newfoundland, her discussion is extremely useful in explaining why Europeans were so confident that Newfoundland was a sensible place to colonize. Another essay that is very useful in providing the background for early seventeenth century colonization efforts is Carole Shammas, "English Commercial Development and American Colonization 1560-1620," in K.R. Andrews, N.P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair (eds.), The Westward Enterprise, English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480-1650 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), pp. 151-174.

Newfoundland did not, of course, measure up to the overly optimistic expectations and predictions of early promoters of colonization. The thin soil, short growing season, lack of diversity in local flora and fauna, climatic extremes and other environmental factors would impair colonization and vigorous settlement growth for well over a century. The survival of the first colonists depended very much on reliable yet not always adequate trans-Atlantic shipments of essential supplies of gear, clothing, and above all food. As Paula Marcoux explains in “Bread and Permanence,” bread was the most essential of common foods of Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yet it represented not only sustenance but a tangible reminder in their new environments of home. As a result, they went to considerable effort to supply themselves with bread. Her essay appears in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 48-56. Yet provisions from home had to be preserved in order to survive the journey without spoiling, and this often meant that the very nourishment on which the colonists depended for survival could also be fatally deficient nutritionally. The persistence of scurvy in the experience of the first colonists was a sobering reminder of the conflict between expectations and the reality of Newfoundland as a venue for successful settlement. J.K. Crellin looks at the problem of scurvy and the the measures used by early colonists to combat it in “Early Settlements in Newfoundland and the Scourge of Scurvy,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History XVII: 1-2 (2000), pp. 127-136; Crellin develops the theme further in A Social History of Medicines in the Twentieth Century: To Be Taken Three Times a Day (New York and London: Pharmaceutical Products Press, 2004). More recently, Steven R. Pendery and Hannah E.C. Koon apply new kinds of evidence – particularly archaeological evidence – to determine the degree to which vitamin deficiencies in early settlements aggravated other challenges of early colonization; see “Scurvy’s Impact on European Colonization in Northeastern North America,” in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 57-65.

The first efforts to colonize Newfoundland occurred early in the seventeenth century, but the idea of establishing permanent settlements on the island had already been promoted for several decades by then. Some late sixteenth century promotional literature appears in David Quinn (ed.), New American World; A Documentary History of North America to 1612. Volume III: Plans for North America. The Roanoke Voyages. New England Ventures (New York: Arno Press, 1979), but it is the fourth volume of this documentary compilation, Newfoundland – From Fishery to Colony; Northwest Passage Searches, that contains the richest sampling of documentation, including much of that associated with Humphrey Gilbert's voyage of 1583 which led to his formal claim of Newfoundland on behalf of Elizabeth I as well as material related to the first colonization venture at Cupid's Cove in 1610. An earlier collection of documentation edited by David Quinn and published in two volumes by the Hakluyt Society in 1940 is The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, which has since been reprinted (New York: Kraus, 1967). David Quinn also wrote a superb booklet for the Newfoundland Historical Society, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Newfoundland (St. John's: Newfoundland Historical Society, 1983) which places Gilbert clearly in his English and North Atlantic social context; this essay has been reprinted in a collection of Quinn's writings, Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625 (London & Ronceverte, WV: Hambledon Press, 1990), pp. 207-24. As well, Quinn wrote the essay on Gilbert that appears in the DCB, I: 331-336.

Though it had no immediate significance in terms of advancing the settlement of Newfoundland, the Gilbert voyage, together with Cabot’s discovery, did add weight to an emerging notion of overseas empire and particularly the belief that not only discovery but also effective occupation were critical to subsequent British claims to sovereignty over Newfoundland; see, for instance, Ken MacMillan, “Discourse on History, Geography, and Law: John Dee and the Limits of the British Empire, 1576-80,” Canadian Journal of History XXXVI: 1 (April 2001), 1-25. MacMillan maintains that, on the eve of Humphrey Gilbert’s famous voyage of 1583, Dee helped define the principles by which sovereignty over overseas territories such as Newfoundland would be asserted, and thereby challenging Spanish and Portuguese claims that were still based in part on papal pronouncements. On the other hand, in "Taking Possession and Reading Texts: Establishing the Authority of Overseas Empires," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XLIX, No. 2 (April 1992), 183-209, Patricia Seed sees strong similarities between the way in which the Spanish and Portuguese asserted claims to overseas territories and the way in which the English subsequently asserted their own claims. A key element in Seed’s analysis is Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s ceremony in St. John’s harbour. While she incorrectly identifies Gilbert’s presence there as “the first English effort at New World settlement” (a not uncommon mistake), her analysis is very useful for the way in which it explores the basis on which Europeans claimed overseas lands not possessed by another Christian monarch. Finally, for insight into the way in which discoveries and claims made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could continue to provide the basis for diplomatic assertions of sovereignty in later centuries, see Vera Lee Brown, "Spanish Claims to a Share in the Newfoundland Fisheries in the Eighteenth Century," Canadian Historical Association Annual Report, 1925, pp. 64-82.

Colonization Attempts in the Seventeenth Century

The first determined attempt at colonization occurred in 1610 at Cupid's Cove under the leadership of John Guy on behalf of the London and Bristol Company or, more commonly, the Newfoundland Company. Apart from the aforementioned documentary collection edited by Quinn, the best work to date on this enterprise is Gillian Cell (ed.), Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonization, 1610-1630 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1982; 2nd series, #180). Cell's "Introduction" is thorough, and revises to some extent the conclusions she drew in her earlier work, English Enterprise at Newfoundland 1577-1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). Should these works not be available, one might consult Cell's essay, "The Cupid's Cove Settlement: A Case Study of the Problems of Colonization," in George M. Story (ed.), Early European Settlement and Exploitation in Atlantic Canada (St. John's: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1982), pp. 97-114. Another of Cell's essays, "The Newfoundland Company: A Study of Subscribers to a Colonizing Venture," The William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XXII(1965): 611-25, places the first attempt to colonize Newfoundland within its English social and economic context. The essay was reprinted in the first edition of J.M. Bumsted (ed.), Canadian History Before Confederation (Georgetown: Irwin-Dorsey, 1972), pp. 43-57. The late Alan F. Williams prepared a full biographical treatment of John Guy, but it was not finished before Williams died. Now, the manuscript has been edited for publication by W. Gordon Handcock and Chesley W. Sanger and published as John Guy of Bristol and Newfoundland: His Life, Times and Legacy (St. John’s, NL: Flanker Press, 2011). The first volume of the DCB also contains useful profiles of John Guy, the pirate Peter Easton, and several of the Cupid's Cove colonists.

What we thought we knew about the Cupids settlement from the historical record has been significantly enhanced since 1995 by the intensive and continuing archaeological work of William Gilbert and his team, supported by the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Corporation. Much of this work is described on-line, though Gilbert’s work has also found its way into more traditional print essays. For example, he was already suggesting as early as 1996 that there was is still much to be learned about this first attempt to establish a colony in Newfoundland; see "Looking for Cupers Cove: Initial Archaeological Survey and Excavations at Cupids, Newfoundland," Avalon Chronicles I (1996): 67-95, together with an update, “Finding Cupers Cove: Archaeology at Cupid’s, Newfoundland until 1696,” Avalon Chronicles VIII (2003), Special Issue, “The English in America 1497-1696,” pp. 117-184. The significance of the archaeological work at Cupids cannot be overstated. This first settlement in Newfoundland had been cited by historians from Prowse to Cell as the outstanding example of a seemingly well-conceived attempt at settlement which quickly failed. The archaeology confirms a different story, for the site was permanently occupied throughout most of the seventeenth century. William Gilbert summarizes what we now know in “`Dwelling there still': Historical Archaeology at Cupids and Changing Perspectives on Early Modern Newfoundland,” in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 215-223.

Gilbert has also written about Guy's efforts to explore the region and his encounter with the Beothuk Indians; see "‘Divers Places': The Beothuk Indians and John Guy's Voyage into Trinity Bay in 1612," Newfoundland Studies VI: 2 (Fall 1990): 147-67. To this point, that encounter has interested historians largely because it is one of the earliest, detailed descriptions by Europeans of Newfoundland's indigenous people. Recently, however, Peter Pope has offered the provocative argument that Beothuk pilfering of iron goods from European fishing camps may have served as an inducement for European settlement; see Peter E. Pope, "Scavengers and Caretakers: Beothuk/European Settlement Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Newfoundland," Newfoundland Studies X: 2 (Fall 1993): 279-293.

Apart from the Cupid's Cove venture, most other English colonization efforts have received uneven treatment. William Vaughan's attempt to establish a colony at Renews is briefly described in Cell's essay on Vaughan in the DCB, I: 654-656 and in her collection of documents, Newfoundland Discovered. More recently, Anne Lake Prescott focuses upon Vaughan’s colonization efforts in order to examine how Newfoundland was perceived by Europeans at this time; see "Relocating Terra Firma: William Vaughan’s Newfoundland," in Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (eds.), Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 125-140. As the editors of this intriguing volume explain in their Introduction, Prescott examines "the mental universe of the English poet and essayist William Vaughan, who, though he probably never visited Newfoundland, was certain he could write with authority about it." Inhabitancy would persist at Renews; this is supported both by the documentary record and increasingly by archaeological work – see, for instance, F.N.L. Poynter (ed.), The Journal of James Yonge (1647-1721) Plymouth Surgeon (Bristol, 1963), as well as Stephen F. Mills, "The House that Yonge Drew? An Example of Seventeenth-Century Vernacular Housing in Renews," Avalon Chronicles I (1996): 43-66. Nevertheless, Vaughan's colonization effort was quickly abandoned, though the experience was not without significance. In a vain attempt to administer and reorganize his colony in 1618, Vaughan appointed Richard Whitbourne, whose essay, "A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land," published in 1620, revised in 1622 and reprinted in both of the document collections which have been edited by Cell and Quinn, has been an important source of information on Newfoundland's fishery and the settlement efforts at this time. Whitbourne's connection with the Renewse settlement continued after Lord Falkland took over the enterprise around 1620. The most thorough discussion of the Renews colony is that provided in Cell's Newfoundland Discovered; Whitbourne and Sir Francis Tanfield (whom Falkland appointed as governor) both appear in essays by Cell in the DCB, I: 668-669 and 632.

The exception to the cursory treatment usually accorded these early colonization efforts is the colony at Ferryland, which was established by George Calvert (later Lord Baltimore) after he purchased a tract of land from William Vaughan. After several years of efforts and considerable investment which was not rewarded with the kind of results Calvert wanted, he gave up on the colony, which was then taken over by David Kirke. Calvert’s role in the history of Ferryland, his subsequent role in setting into motion the founding of Maryland in what is now the United States, together with a fairly rich manuscript legacy, has meant that Calvert has attracted a greater degree of academic attention than almost any other individual associated with the early attempts to colonize Newfoundland. Moreover, the tradition of manuscript research has recently been enhanced by extensive archaeological excavations on the Ferryland site. Peter Pope brought both the historian’s skills and those of the archaeologist to bear on the Ferryland experience in his award-winning dissertation, The South Avalon Planters, 1630 to 1700: Residence, Labour, Demand and Exchange in Seventeenth-century Newfoundland (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1992). That dissertation , together with more than a decade’s additional research, would be transformed into Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Pope’s definitive monograph on the relationship between English settlement, the fishery, and the exchange of fish for Iberian wine during the seventeenth century. This seminal work not only challenges much of the persistent received wisdom about the early fishery, trade and settlement in Newfoundland but lays it permanently (one hopes!) to rest. The book should become essential reading for every student in early modern Newfoundland history.

For students engaged in research into the Ferryland colony, there is considerable documentary material in print. Much of this material was compiled in Gillian Cell’s Newfoundland Discovered as well as her earlier English Enterprise. To this, we can add "Six Letters from the Early Colony of Avalon" which Peter Pope contributed to Avalon Chronicles I (1996): 1-20. A recent addition to the documentary legacy is "Edward Wynne’s The Brittish India or A Compendious Discourse tending to Advancement (circa 1630-1631)," with an extensive introduction by Barry C. Gaulton and Aaron F. Miller, together with a transcription of Wynne’s essay. Wynne was Calvert’s governor at Ferryland from 1621 to 1625 (a brief biography of Wynne by Gillian Cell appears in the DCB, Vol. I, p. 672), and his essay used that experience to promote overseas English colonization. The document is featured in Newfoundland and Labrador Studies XXIV: 1 (Spring 2009): 111-137.

Insight into the Calvert family itself is possible through a substantial literature. It is unlikely that much can be added to what Peter Pope has to say in his aforementioned book, Fish Into Wine. Still, the MA dissertation by James Edward Prindeville, The Calvert Family Claims to the Colony of Avalon in Newfoundland 1623-1754 (MA thesis, Catholic University of America, Washington DC, 1949), remains useful, though a more modern and comprehensive study – one that examines the family both before, during and after its Newfoundland experience – is now available to students in English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century by John D. Krugler (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). In “The Lords Baltimore in Ireland,” James Lyttleton looks at the experience of the Lords Baltimore in Ireland, and the degree to which this conditioned their experiences in Newfoundland. The essay appears in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 259-269. There are as well a number of essays and articles in print on Calvert’s Ferryland colony. For many years, the standard overview of the colony was provided by Thomas Coakley in "George Calvert and Newfoundland: ‘The Sad Face of Winter’," Maryland Historical Magazine LXXI: 1 (Spring 1976): 1-18. Coakley explained Calvert’s decision to withdraw from the colony in terms of the difficult environmental challenge facing the colonists in Newfoundland. Thus, Coakley reinforced the prevailing view that the colony struggled, a view which Pope and others have gone far to amend. See for instance “Ferryland’s First Settlers (and a Dog Story)” by James A. Tuck, which surveys Calvert’s tenure in Ferryland between 1621 and 1629. While Tuck concedes that “weather has traditionally been seen as the reason for Calvert’s departure..., other factors may have precipitated his move to the Chesapeake in 1629.” The essay appears in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 270-277. See also what conclusions can be drawn from comparative archaeology by looking at Aaron F. Miller, Avalon and Maryland: A Comparative Historical Archaeology of the Seventeenth-Century New World Provinces of the Lords Baltimore (1621–1644) (PhD thesis. Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2013).

Calvert was also quite sympathetic to Roman Catholicism at a time when Catholics in England faced discrimination and growing persecution; Calvert would eventually convert to Catholicism. This has long raised questions whether Calvert was motivated into sponsoring a colony in Newfoundland out of a desire to create a religious haven for Catholics. Coakley makes clear that this was not the case, but the Catholic connection continues to attract interest. Raymond Lahey explores this element in "The Role of Religion in Lord Baltimore's Colonial Enterprise," Maryland Historical Magazine LXXII: 4(Winter 1977): 492-511 as well as in "Avalon: Lord Baltimore's Colony in Newfoundland," in George M. Story (ed.), Early European Settlement and Exploitation in Atlantic Canada (St. John's: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1982), pp. 115-138. However, Lahey recognizes that the evidence is only suggestive and still favours Coakley's conclusion. More recently, Luca Codignola has turned to documents in the Papal Archives in the Vatican to expand upon the connection between the Ferryland colony and Catholicism; his research, based on a selection of documents which he presents in The Coldest Harbour of the Land; Simon Stock and Lord Baltimore's Colony in Newfoundland, 1621-1649 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988; trans. Anita Weston), does not significantly alter the conclusions of Coakley and Cell.

Although Allan Fraser’s essay on George Calvert in the DCB, I: 162-3 concludes that Calvert had no lasting influence on Newfoundland, this too is an assessment that is being revised thanks to recent historical and archaeological scholarship. The substantial archaeological work undertaken at Ferryland over the past decade to which reference has already been made has led not only to a substantial reassessment in its own right of the history of the colony but has also encouraged renewed interest in the documentary history of the colony. One very tangible benefit of this attention has been the creation of the "Colony of Avalon Foundation" which began publishing Avalon Chronicles, an annual yearbook of scholarly research concerning not only the Ferryland experience but "the early colonial history and archaeology of eastern North America" as well. Thus, the first volume includes not only essays on Ferryland but on Cupid’s Cove and Renews as well (see elsewhere for specific references).

The archaeological work at Ferryland has been directed by Memorial University of Newfoundland's James Tuck, who describes both the archaeology itself and the history of archaeology at Ferryland in "Archaeology at Ferryland, Newfoundland," Newfoundland Studies X: 2(Fall 1993): 294-310, "Archaeology at Ferryland, Newfoundland 1936-1995," Avalon Chronicles I (1996): 21-41, and (co-authored with Barry Gaulton) “The Archaeology of Ferryland, Newfoundland until 1696,” Avalon Chronicles VIII (2003), Special Issue, “The English in America 1497-1696,” pp. 187-224. This work is not yet complete, but already it has provided us with a much richer appreciation of everyday life in seventeenth-century Newfoundland. See for example Lisa M. Hodgetts, "Feast or Famine? Seventeenth-Century English Colonial Diet at Ferryland, Newfoundland," Historical Archaeology XL: 4 (Winter 2006), 125-138. More to the point, all this work confirms that Ferryland, in contrast to past perceptions of early Newfoundland colonization ventures, should not be regarded as a "failure." Together with the archaeological work being done at Cupid’s on John Guy’s settlement, this forces us to rethink our understanding of the history of seventeenth-century Newfoundland.

After Calvert’s departure, David Kirke took Ferryland over and quickly clashed with the seasonal fishermen. Eventually, Kirke was made to return to England to answer charges of interference with the fishery, and this has long provided much ammunition for those who argued that the growth of Newfoundland settlement was impaired by an unremitting hostility between the fishing interests and the settlers. See for example John Moir’s discussion of Kirke’s tenure at Ferryland in his essay on Kirke in the DCB, I: 404-407. While such a conclusion still cannot be ruled out entirely, it is also evident that the real story is much more complicated than that. For instance, due to the work of Tuck, Pope, and others, there has been growing interest in the ability of the Kirke family to thrive in a place in which the Calvert family had invested a great deal and yet, in the end, abandoned. Reinforcing the conclusions Peter Pope reached in his monograph, Barry Gaulton attributes the Kirke success to their ability to modify the Calvert infrastructure at Ferryland and develop a plantation based on merchandising and fishing; see “The Commercial Development of Newfoundland's English Shore: The Kirke Family at Ferryland, 1638-96,” in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 278-286. It is certainly clear that the findings of the archaeological teams at Ferryland and at Cupid’s, together with the comprehensive reexamination of the manuscript record by Peter Pope in his doctoral dissertation and numerous articles provide a striking demonstration of the way in which the revision of Newfoundland history is both vigorous and persistent.

That revision affects not only the English attempts at colonization in seventeenth-century Newfoundland but also French efforts. An important element in the process of revision is provided by the useful comparisons that can be made between the English experience at colonizing Newfoundland with that of the French. The French colony of Plaisance (Placentia, as it was known to the English), was founded in 1662. For the longest time, the best available work in English on the French colonial experience in Newfoundland was F.B. Briffett, A History of the French in Newfoundland Previous to 1714 (MA thesis, Queen's University, 1927). Then came a number of studies emerging out of Parks Canada research into the structural remains of the colony by John Humphreys, Jean-Pierre Proulx, Frederick J. Thorpe and others. For many years, one of the better overviews of Plaisance was the brief survey by John Humphreys; see Plaisance: Problems of Settlement at this Newfoundland Outpost of New France 1660-1690 (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1970). But Humphreys also endorsed the notion that Plaisance was a colony which struggled against several handicaps, and that its growth was therefore impaired, with the result that the French Crown gave up on Plaisance and turned it over to the British in 1714. In short, historians of Plaisance, like those who studied the English colonies of the first half of the seventeenth century, concluded that the colonization of Newfoundland was not a success.

As evidence of this "failed colony" paradigm, historians pointed to the several censuses compiled by the authorities; these were assembled and published by Fernand-D. Thibodeau as "Recensements de Terreneuve et Plaisance" in Mémoires de la Société Généologique Canadienne-Française X: 3-4 (juillet-octobre 1959), 179-88, XI: 1-2 (janvier-avril 1960), 69-85, XIII: 10 (octobre 1962): 204-8, and XIII: 12 (décembre 1962), 244-55. These seemed to confirm that the French colony suffered from mediocre growth. A "snapshot" of Plaisance in the mid-1690s is also provided by an anonymous and undated document found in the French archives. Caroline Ménard has examined the document and suggests that it was written by Claude-Charles Bacqueville de la Potherie (1663-1736), author of Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale (Paris, 1722); see "Documents: Un mémoire écrit par Bacqueville de la Potherie?," Newfoundland and Labrador Studies XXI: 2 (Fall 2006), 319-341. The unimpressive performance of the French colony has been blamed on friction between metropolitan fishermen and resident fishermen, while Humphreys blamed the seeming lack of growth on environmental factors which prevented the settlement from developing a more robust and versatile economy, and instead made it dependent on the fisheries.

But was the performance of the French colony of Plaisance truly mediocre? In her PhD dissertation, The Historical Archaeology of a French Fortification in the Colony of Plaisance, the Vieux Fort Site (ChAl-04), Placentia, Newfoundland (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2012), Amanda Crompton points out that Plaisance "never supported a very large population, but neither did other Newfoundland settlements, nor did other settlements elsewhere in Acadia and Maine," citing Peter Pope’s Fish Into Wine. The permanent population could draw from the seasonal labour force to serve their labour needs, so this also enabled the colony to thrive without a large resident population. Crompton supports her conclusions with reference to work by Nicolas Landry, who offered an analysis of the seemingly weak demographic performance of Plaisance in his article "Peuplement d’une colonie de pLche sous le régime français: Plaisance, 1671-1714," The Northern Mariner / Le Marin du nord XI: 2 (April 2001): 19-37. Crompton also points out that a number of permanent residents had spouses in other parts of the French Atlantic, such as France. "Clearly, the notion of a permanently-resident family was not limited to the presence of the nuclear family living in the colony. Indeed, fishing colonies did not need continual population growth in order to be vital places.... fishing colony populations are smaller than colonies elsewhere" (pp. 82-83). Students should also consult what is sure to become the definitive treatment of the French colony, Plaisance, Terre-Neuve 1650-1713: Une colonie française en Amérique (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2008) by Nicolas Landry.

Nevertheless, in one very important respect, Plaisance did not resemble the earlier English attempts at colonization in Newfoundland. Unlike those English colonies, Plaisance was a creation of the government. As Elizabeth Mancke succinctly explains, "Plaisance ... functioned not so much as a colony – the nucleus of a new society – but as a way for the French government to assert administrative control, if not sovereignty, over the highly decentralized and dispersed commercial spaces of the fishery." See Elizabeth Mancke, "Spaces of Power in the Early Modern Northeast," in Stephen J. Hornsby and John G. Reid (eds.), New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), pp. 32-49, esp. p. 42; see also Laurier Turgeon, "Colbert et la pêche française à Terre-Neuve," in Roland Mousnier (directeur), Un Nouveau Colbert: Actes du Colloque pour le tricentenaire de la mort de Colbert (Paris: Editions Sedes, 1985), pp. 255-268. This meant that the French Crown invested a great deal of human and financial capital in the colony – the fortifications, the garrison, the administration. The fact that this enormous expenditure did not apparently stimulate substantial growth at Plaisance has been used as further evidence of the "failed colony" paradigm. Frederick J. Thorpe explores this paradox in "Fish, Forts and Finance: The Politics of French Construction at Placentia, 1699-1710," Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers 1971, pp. 52-63, subsequently developing the theme more fully in his doctoral dissertation, The Politics of French Public Construction in the Islands of the Gulf of St. Laurent, 1695-1758 (PhD thesis, University of Ottawa, 1974). See also Roland Plaze, La colonie Royale de Plaisance, 1689-1713: impact du statut de colonie royale sur les structures administratives (MA thesis, Université de Moncton, 1991) as well as essays on the Sieur de La Poippe and Antoine Parat, both of whom served as governors at Plaisance, in the DCB, I: 418-419, 530.

In fairness, it would probably be more accurate to say that the Crown was disappointed with the way in which the colony satisfied – or not – the role it was expected to play in the French mercantile empire of the North Atlantic. It certainly seems reasonable to conclude that the difficulty of finding a prosperous niche within the emerging French Atlantic led merchants at Plaisance to turn to commercial linkages outside that mercantilistic framework. Thus, we know that Plaisance developed trade links with New England – see the biography of David Basset in the DCB, II, pp. 46-47. Basset was a Boston-based trader of Acadian Huguenot origins who engaged in commerce between New England and Plaisance. Amanda Crompton confirms that, while the little French colony might not have been able to rely on supplies delivered by official ships, it could and did develop commercial connections (indeed “a dependence”) on seasonal visits by merchant ships from other parts of the Atlantic world. The archaeological record reflects both the nature and the sources of necessary supplies as well as the social contexts of this colonial-metropolitan trade; see Crompton’s essay, “Of Obligation and Necessity: The Social Contexts of Trade between Permanent Residents and Migratory Traders in Plaisance, Newfoundland (1662-90),” in Peter E. Pope (ed.), with Shannon Lewis-Simpson, Exploring Atlantic Transitions: Archaeologies of Transience and Permanence in New Found Lands (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 245-255. Crompton also provides us with a fascinating glimpse into the everyday material world of the French soldiers who were stationed in Plaisance in “‘Deux mains pour la guerre et la terre’: Soldiers in the French Colony of Plaisance, Newfoundland, 1662-1690,” in Scott Jamieson, Anne Pelta, Anne Thareau (eds.), Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, Occasional Papers No. 3: The French Presence in Newfoundland and Labrador: Past, Present, and Future (St. John’s: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2015), pp. 159-187.

The other consequence of Plaisance’s role as a Crown colony was visible during the wars fought between France and England during the life of the colony. Interest in the military and naval function of Plaisance can be traced back to Grace Tomkinson, "That Wasp’s Nest, Placentia," Dalhousie Review XIX (1939), 204-214. More recent publications offer a more analytical approach to the strategic function of Plaisance. See for example two essays which appeared n Yves Tremblay (ed.), Canadian Military History Since the Seventeenth Century; Proceedings of the Canadian Military History Conference, Ottawa, 5-9 May 2000 (Ottawa: Directorate of History and Heritage, National Defence, 2001); Frederick J. Thorpe contributed "French Strategic Ideas in the Defence of the Cod Fishery 1663-1713," pp. 41-47, and James Pritchard contributed "Canada and the Defence of Newfoundland During The War of the Spanish Succession, 1702-1713," pp. 49-57. In "‘Le Profit et La Gloire’: The French Navy’s Alliance With Private Enterprise in the Defense of Newfoundland, 1691-1697," Newfoundland Studies XV: 2 (Fall 1999): 161-175, James Pritchard offers not only a fine study of the defence of Plaisance in wartime, but also reveals the degree to which the French state relied on private enterprise rather than its navy to maintain its presence in Newfoundland. Nicolas Landry has turned his attention to Plaisance-based privateering during the war immediately following, with particular attention to its significance to the local economy; see "Portrait des activités de course à Plaisance, Terre-Neuve, 1700-1715," Les Cahiers de la Société historique acadienne XXXIII (1 et 2), 68-87, and "Les activités de course dans un port colonial français: Plaisance, Terre-Neuve, durant la guerre de Succession d’Espagne, 1702-1713," Acadiensis XXXIV: 1 (Autumn 2004): 56-79. Landry also explores the ingredients essential to the success of the merchants of Plaisance in "‘Qu’il sera fait droit à qui il appartiendra’: la société de Lasson-Daccarrette à Plaisance 1700-1715," Newfoundland Studies XVII: 2 (Fall 2001): 220-256. Of course, these articles appeared before Landry’s book, Plaisance, Terre-Neuve 1650-1713: Une colonie française en Amérique (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2008) and students are encouraged to turn there first.

Plaisance was not the only place where French fishermen established settlement in Newfoundland. A convenient overview of French settlement in other parts of Newfoundland is presented by Olaf U. Janzen in "The French Presence in Southwestern and Western Newfoundland Before 1815," in André Magord (directeur), Les Franco-Terreneuviens de la péninsule de Port-au-Port: Évolution d’une identité franco-canadienne (Moncton, New Brunswick: Chaire d’études acadiennes, Université de Moncton, 2002), pp. 29-49. Janzen develops the overview in order to provide context for his examination of French settlement in the Port-aux-Basques and Codroy area, a subject that he developed in such earlier publications as “‘Une grande liaison’: French Fishermen from Ile Royale on the Coast of Southwestern Newfoundland, 1714-1766 – A Preliminary Survey,” Newfoundland Studies III: 2 (Fall, 1987): 183-200 and “‘Une petite Republique’ in Southwestern Newfoundland: The Limits of Imperial Authority in a Remote Maritime Environment,” in Research in Maritime History, Vol. 3: People of the Northern Seas (St. John’s, NF: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1992), ed. Lewis Fischer and Walter Minchinton, pp. 1-33, reprinted in Olaf U. Janzen, War and Trade in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland (“Research in Maritime History,” No. 52; St. John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2013), pp. 69-97. The vulnerability of this remote French community in wartime was the focus of another of Janzen’s essays, “Un Petit Dérangement: The Eviction of French Fishermen from Newfoundland in 1755,” in Olaf U. Janzen, War and Trade in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland (“Research in Maritime History,” No. 52; St. John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2013), pp. 119-128.

Before we leave the topic of Plaisance, some words should be said about our understanding of the society of the French fishermen who lived in Newfoundland. For the longest time, we knew very little about the social life of the fisher folk of Plaisance and the adjacent communities during the era of French settlement in Newfoundland. This deficiency is ending, thanks in considerable measure to the efforts of Nicolas Landry, who has used the post-mortem inventories of Plaisance to reveal more about the material culture of the inhabitants of the lower social classes of Plaisance. His findings appeared initially in several essays, including "Transmission du patrimoine dans une colonie de pLche: analyse préliminaire des inventaires après-décès à Plaisance au XVIIIe siècle," in A.J.B. Johnston (ed.), Essays in French Colonial History: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of The French Colonial Historical Society (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), pp. 156-70; and "Culture matérielle et niveaux de richesse chez les pêcheurs de Plaisance et de l’île Royale, 1700-1758," Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998): 101-122. Landry has also endeavoured to look comparatively at working conditions in three separate fishing societies during the French regime, including Plaisance, Île Royale and the Gaspé in "Pêcheurs et entrepreneurs dans le Golfe du Saint-Laurent sous le régime français," Port Acadie: Revue interdisciplinaire en études acadiennes, III (printemps/Spring 2002): 13-42. Nor has Landry neglected the seasonal and migratory labourers in the French fishery; see Nicolas Landry, "Pecheurs-engagés à Terre-Neuve sous le Régime français, 1688-1713," French Colonial History VIII (2007): 1-21.

Others have followed in Landry’s footsteps. Damien Rouet, for example, has attempted to reconstruct the society of Plaisance towards the end of the French period of control; see "Territoires, identité et colonisation: l’exemple de Plaisance," in Maurice Basque and Jacques-Paul Couturier (eds.), Les Territoires de l’identité: perspectives acadiennes et françaises, XVIIe-XXe siècles (Moncton: Université de Moncton, 2005), pp. 191-203. In Religious Life in French Newfoundland to 1714 (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1999) Victoria Taylor-Hood examines the religious life of Plaisance. She suggests that the clergy who served the colony – the secular clergy during its early years, then the Récollet friars, engaged not only in missionary work in Plaisance and the surrounding areas but often found themselves dealing with problems such as conflict with the secular authorities of the colony, a lack of religious participation by the inhabitants, insufficient or inconsistent funding, and problems of recruitment within their own ranks. But again, with the publication of Plaisance, Terre-Neuve 1650-1713: Une colonie française en Amérique (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2008), much of what we now know about Plaisance has been brought together into a comprehensive single-volume treatment.

Migration and Permanent Settlement

Even if colonization on the island of Newfoundland, whether by corporate, private, or government sponsors, English or French, had mixed results (and the evidence now supports those who argue that Ferryland, possibly Cupers Cove at modern-day Cupid’s, and therefore conceivably at other locations were much more successful than was traditionally believed), this did not preclude permanent settlement there. A resident population did develop on the island during the seventeenth century, and though it remained extremely small (probably no more than 2,000 people) and was constantly changing, it did persist. An excellent survey of the relationship between the migratory fishermen and the emerging residential fisher population is provided by James E. Candow in his essay "Migrants and Residents: The Interplay between European and Domestic Fisheries in Northeast North America, 1502-1854," in David J. Starkey, Jón Th. Thór, Ingo Heidbrink (eds.), A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries, Volume 1: From Early Times to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Bremen: Hauschild for the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, 2009), pp. 416-452. Yet the most thorough analysis to date of the complex factors that sustained that population yet seemingly constrained its growth is unquestionably that found in the aforementioned book by Peter Pope, Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Pope has also compressed some of his ideas and interpretation into a succinct overview of seventeenth-century Newfoundland inhabitancy in “Outport Economics: Culture and Agriculture in Later Seventeenth-Century Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Studies XIX: 1 (Spring 2003; Special Issue on “The New Early Modern Newfoundland: to 1730"): 153-186. Kenneth Norrie and Rick Szostak provide a comprehensive overview of the transition from an essentially migratory and seasonal labour force through a transitional era in which migrant and permanent fishermen co-exist to the point where the permanent population became the dominant force in the Newfoundland fishery; see “Allocating Property Rights Over Shoreline: Institutional Change in the Newfoundland Inshore Fishery,” Newfoundland Quarterly XX: 2 (Fall 2005): 233-263. Alan G. Macpherson examines the demographic character of Newfoundland in microcosm with a paper that focuses entirely on St. John’s; see “The Demographic History of St. John’s, 1627-2001: An Introductory Essay,” in Alan G. Macpherson (ed.), Four Centuries and the City: Perspectives on the Historical Geography of St. John’s (St. John’s: Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2005), pp. 1-18. But the most provocative analysis to date of settlement in seventeenth-century Newfoundland is surely Robert C.H. Sweeny’s essay, “What Difference Does a Mode Make? A Comparison of Two Seventeenth-Century Colonies: Canada and Newfoundland,” which appeared in The William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., LXIII: No. 2 (April 2006): 281-304. This was a special issue of that journal, one devoted to the theme “Class and Early America,” and Sweeny brings a decidedly Marxist perspective to his subject, one that is sure to generate heated debate – for instance, he characterizes seventeenth-century Newfoundland as “the world’s first capitalist society.” In his efforts to develop his case, Sweeny shows more than once that his familiarity with the detail of early modern Newfoundland fisher society is not always solid (he claims at one point that the inshore fishery used dories in the 1600s, centuries before the specialized boat-type of that name was introduced to Newfoundland). While students should not be discouraged from using the essay, they should probably therefore exercise more than the usual degree of caution.

Though the permanent population remained small, it did persist, thanks in part to a number of adaptive strategies adopted by the residents. Inhabitants supplemented their diet and income with fur trapping and sealing, and while such activities never replaced the cod fishery, they were significant, because both were winter activities and they therefore complemented the summer cod fishery rather than compete with it for the time and energy of the inhabitant. Gardening also played a role in supporting population growth. Official reports show that the quantity of “improved” land increased steadily through the century, enhancing the ability of residents to feed themselves. All of these activities are described at greater length later in this “reader’s guide.” One adaptive strategy should, however, be mentioned here, since it had already made its appearance before the seventeenth century ended. This is the practice of “winterhousing,” a strategy in which residents of coastal fishing communities would break up into small family units in the fall and disperse into the woods, to live in simple shacks or tilts until the spring. There they would subsist by hunting, fur trapping, and wood cutting. Winterhousing appears to have been well-established by 1696, according to reports by Father Baudoin, who accompanied d’Iberville’s raiding expedition against the English Shore; see Alan Williams, Father Baudoin's War: D'Iberville's Campaigns in Acadia and Newfoundland 1696, 1697 (St. John's: Department of Geography, 1987). According to anthropologist Philip Smith, winterhousing appears to have been an adaptive strategy developed in Newfoundland, rather than being imported from elsewhere, and was most prevalent in Conception, Trinity, and Bonavista Bays where there were forests that would support the sort of activities described. See “In Winter Quarters,” Newfoundland Studies III: 1(Spring 1987), 1-36, “Transhumant Europeans Overseas: The Newfoundland Case,” Current Anthropology XXVIII: 2 (April 1987), 241-250, “Européens transhumants non pastoraux de la période récente sur la côte atlantique du Canada,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec XXIII: 4 (Hiver 1993-94), 5-21, and “Transhumance among European settlers in Atlantic Canada," Geographical Journal CLXI: 1 (March 1995), 79-86, all by Philip E.L. Smith. See also David N. Collins, “Foe, Friend and Fragility: Evolving Settler Interactions with the Newfoundland Wilderness,” British Journal of Canadian Studies XXI: 1 (May 2008): 35-62.

Although Pope, Smith, and others have therefore forced us to revise our assumptions about the nature and success of Newfoundland inhabitancy in the seventeenth century, this does not dispute the fact that it was only in the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century that the residential population began to experience substantial and persistent growth. This process was largely dependent on migration from England and Ireland that persisted into the early nineteenth century, after which population growth was derived almost exclusively from natural increase. A substantial literature, much of it by historical geographers, has developed to define and to explain the population growth of Newfoundland. The complementary relationship between the fishery and the resident population lies at the heart of C. Grant Head's Eighteenth Century Newfoundland: A Geographer's Perspective (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1976). John Mannion takes a much narrower focus in exploring the same theme; in “Population and Economy: Geographical Perspectives on Newfoundland in 1732,” Newfoundland & Labrador Studies XXVIII: 2 (Fall 2013): 219-265, he provides us with a detailed snapshot of residency in Newfoundland in just one year. This essay really should be basic reading for anyone venturing into a study of eighteenth-century Newfoundland society, for Mannion very carefully explains why the statistics compiled annually by the naval commodores must be used with great care, even as he concedes that, for all their flaws, those statistics are equal, if not superior, to statistics available for the British Isles or other British colonies at the time. Another historical geographer, W. Gordon Handcock, narrows his perspective by focussing on just one community. He demonstrates the relationship between commercial development in Newfoundland and the growth of settlement very convincingly in an essay on “The Poole Mercantile Community and the Growth of Trinity 1700-1839,” The Newfoundland Quarterly LXXX: 3(Winter 1985): 19-30. In “Business Rivalry in the Colonial Atlantic: A Five Forces Analysis,” an unpublished paper (2013) which is accessible at the searchable SSRN eLibrary, Allan Dwyer is even more direct: in their efforts to extend the cod fishery and their operations into Notre Dame Bay, competing merchants Benjamin Lester and John Slade used access to credit through the truck system to encourage settlement by fishing planters; they in turn hired “servants” (contract or indentured labourers) to prosecute the summer cod fishery and associated ancillary activities.

In short, scholars today completely reject the old myth which claimed that migratory fishing interests were responsible for discouraging settlement growth. The pioneering work of Keith Matthews, who drew attention to the obvious point that the resident population in Newfoundland originated in the same southwestern region of England in which the British fishery was based or the same southeastern Irish region where the British fishery began increasingly to acquire provisions and recruit labour. A more extensive exposition of Handcock’s analysis is provided in Soe longe as there comes noe women: Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland (St. John’s: Breakwater Press, 1989), a work which emerged out of Handcock’s Ph.D. thesis, An Historical Geography of the Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland: A Study of the Migration Process (PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 1979). Handcock’s conclusions are presented graphically in Plate 26 on “Trinity, 18th Century” in the HAC, I. Finally, Alan G. Macpherson examines the demographic character of Newfoundland in microcosm with a paper that focuses entirely on St. John’s; see “The Demographic History of St. John’s, 1627-2001: An Introductory Essay,” in Alan G. Macpherson (ed.), Four Centuries and the City: Perspectives on the Historical Geography of St. John’s (St. John’s: Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2005), pp. 1-18.

Another seminal work was John Mannion (ed.), The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography (St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1977), which includes essays by the editor linking merchant trading networks and permanent settlement in western Newfoundland during the nineteenth century ("Settlers and Traders in Western Newfoundland," pp. 234-275), one of W. Gordon Handcock’s earliest published assessments of the relationship between the Westcountry fishery and permanent settlement in Newfoundland (see “English Migration to Newfoundland,” pp. 15-48), an essay by Patricia Thornton which analyses the connection between merchants and settlement in "The Demographic and Mercantile Bases of Initial Permanent Settlement in the Strait of Belle Isle," pp. 152-183, an essay by Chesley Sanger linking "The Evolution of Sealing and the Spread of Permanent Settlement in Northeastern Newfoundland," pp. 136-151, and Alan Macpherson's analysis, "A Modal Sequence in the Peopling of Central Bonavista Bay, 1676-1857," pp. 102-135. In his "Introduction" to this collection, Mannion makes an extremely useful distinction between seasonal, temporary, and permanent migration. Seasonal migrants came to Newfoundland to fish and returned to the British Isles at the end of the season. Temporary migrants came to Newfoundland and remained for a few years, but eventually returned to the British Isles. Permanent migrants came and stayed for the rest of their lives. These distinctions are necessary in avoiding the trap of accepting contemporary population estimates, which were based on the simplistic distinction between migratory and resident fishermen.

Kenneth Norrie and Rick Szostak provide a comprehensive overview of the transition from an essentially migratory and seasonal labour force through a transitional era in which migrant and permanent fishermen co-exist to the point where the permanent population became the dominant force in the Newfoundland fishery; see “Allocating Property Rights Over Shoreline: Institutional Change in the Newfoundland Inshore Fishery,” Newfoundland Quarterly XX: 2 (Fall 2005): 233-263. In “The Biological Collapse of Atlantic Cod off Newfoundland and Labrador: An Exploration of Historical Changes in Exploration, Harvesting Technology, and Management,” Jeffrey Hutchings and the late Ransom Myers utilize a wide array of historical and contemporary materials to reconstruct a detailed history of the Newfoundland cod fishery in an effort to explain the collapse of Northern cod in the late twentieth century. They question whether that collapse can be explained solely in terms of “environmental” changes, suggesting instead that there was already evidence of overfishing as early as the mid-1800s. In short, the impact of European fisheries and European settlement are linked, and must be included in any analysis of catch rates. The article appears in in Ragnar Arnason and Larry Felt (eds.), The North Atlantic Fishery: Strengths, Weaknesses and Challenges (Charlottetown: The Institute for Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, 1995), pp 37-93. Myers subsequently presented an intriguing and compelling analysis demonstrating a link between settlement and catch rates in “Testing Ecological Models: The Influence of Catch Rates on Settlement of Fishermen in Newfoundland, 1710-1833,” in Poul Holm, Tim D. Smith, David J. Starkey (eds.), The Exploited Seas: New Directions for Marine Environmental History (Research in Maritime History, No. 21; St. John’s, NF: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2002), pp. 13-29. Myers uses Scott Gordon’s bio-economic model for an open access fishery to confirm that fishermen in three bays in Newfoundland tended to settle when catch rates exceeded a particular threshold levels (forty quintals of dried salt cod per man per year).

Yet there was more to the transition to permanent residency than catch rates. In Land Tenure, Landowners, and Servitude on the Early-Eighteenth Century English Shore (M.A. research paper, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2004), Andrew Rolfson examines the nature and significance of land tenure and property rights in shaping settlement growth and class. He suggests that land tenure was a critical factor in restraining population growth, since the ability to support oneself in the fishery depended not simply on the ability to catch fish but to also to cure it, and this required dry ground. Rolfson’s essay is especially useful for the discussion it provides of the social and legal status of servants, particularly the legal and social elements that limited social mobility (including the acquisition of property) in eighteenth-century Newfoundland. Allan Dwyer’s research shows how the credit system known as “truck” played a critical role in making permanent residency in Newfoundland possible. See An economic profile of Fogo Island planters and the Slade merchant company, 1785-1805 (MA thesis, McGill University, 1989), and, more recently, Atlantic Borderland: Natives, Fishers, Planters and Merchants in Notre Dame Bay, 1713-1802 (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2012). Out of this thesis research emerged an essay on “A Different Kind of Newfoundland: Planter Success in 18th-Century Notre Dame Bay,” Newfoundland Quarterly XCIX: 2 (2006): 38-45. Here, Dwyer examines how the merchant John Slade and his successors made residency possible through the extension of credit through “truck.” This means that students must take care not to dismiss “truck” in the eighteenth century simplistically as a purely and ruthlessly exploitive system; while the relationship between merchants who extended credit and the planter who depended on it was never an equitable one, nevertheless truck made the expansion of the resident population in eighteenth-century Newfoundland possible.

The close relationship which existed between the British fishery in Newfoundland and the development of permanent residency left a powerful imprint on the character of the residential society of eighteenth-century Newfoundland. Take for example the Irish component of that society. Irish migration to Newfoundland was very closely linked to the English Westcountry fishing industry, which began using southeast Ireland as an important provisioning and labour recruiting centre. Nicholas R. Burke provided an early examination of this role in “Some Observations on the Migration of Labourers from the South of Ireland to Newfoundland in Pre-Famine Times," Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society LXXVI (July-December 1971): 95-109. Yet Burke’s discussion, as innovative as it once was, is now a striking example of just how far the study of Newfoundland history has come in the past twenty-five years. An instrumental figure in the revision of our perception of the complexity of Ireland's social and economic connection with Newfoundland has been John Mannion. See, for instance, "The Maritime Trade of Waterford in the Eighteenth Century," in W. Smyth and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Common Ground; Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1988), pp. 208-233; "A Transatlantic Merchant Fishery: Richard Welsh of New Ross and the Sweetmans of Newbawn in Newfoundland 1734-1862," in Kevin Whelan and William Nolan (eds.), Wexford: History and Society. Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1987), pp. 373-421, 543-5, and "The Waterford Merchants and the Irish-Newfoundland Provisions Trade 1770-1820" in Donald Akenson (ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History, Vol. III (Gananoque: Langdale Press, 1982), pp. 178-203. On the particular theme of Irish migration, Mannion offers "Old World Antecedents, New World Adaptations: Inistioge (Co. Kilkenny) Immigrants in Newfoundland," Newfoundland Studies V: 2(Fall 1989): 103-176. Tom Nemec provides an extremely useful overview of "The Irish Emigration to Newfoundland," in The Newfoundland Quarterly LXIX: 1(1972): 15-19, 22-4 while John Mannion presents a long-overdue assessment of the nature and significance of the first few decades of significant Irish migration to Newfoundland in "Irish Migration and Settlement in Newfoundland: The Formative Phase, 1697-1732," Newfoundland Studies XVII: 2 (Fall 2001): 257-293.

Both Nemec and Mannion complement their assessments of Irish migration view with instructive case studies of eighteenth-century Irish-Newfoundland communities – Nemec looks at "Trepassey, 1505-1840 A.D.: The Emergence of an Anglo-Irish Newfoundland Outport," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXIX: 4 (March 1973): 17-28, with a companion essay, "Trepassey, 1840-1900: An Ethnohistorical Reconstruction of Anglo-Irish Outport Society," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXX: 1 (June 1973): 15-24 that carries the story forward through the nineteenth century; Mannion focuses on the community of Placentia in "Irish Merchants Abroad: The Newfoundland Experience, 1750-1850," Newfoundland Studies II: 2 (Fall 1986): 127-190 and in "A Transatlantic Merchant Fishery: Richard Welsh of New Ross and the Sweetmans of Newbawn in Newfoundland 1734-1862," in Kevin Whelan and William Nolan (eds.), Wexford: History and Society. Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1987), pp. 373-421, 543-5. The activities of one Irish merchant in Newfoundland, including the role played in Irish migration to the island, is detailed in John Mannion, "Patrick Morris and Newfoundland Irish Immigration," in Cyril Byrne and Margaret Harry (eds.), Talamh an Eisc; Canadian and Irish Essays (Halifax: Nimbus, 1986), pp. 180-202. Another of Mannion's essays, "Migration and Upward Mobility; the Meagher Family in Ireland and Newfoundland, 1730-1830," Irish Economic and Social History XV (1988): 54-70, shows that for some, migration provided the opportunity not only for work but also for upward mobility; in the course of developing this analysis, Mannion also succeeds in describing the challenges and stratagems of merchants struggling to succeed within the fishing economy. More recently, Allan Dwyer has examined the other end of the social spectrum in the evolution of an Irish-Newfoundland community in Tilting, Notre Dame Bay; see An economic profile of Fogo Island planters and the Slade merchant company, 1785-1805 (MA thesis, McGill University, 1989), and, more recently, Atlantic Borderland: Natives, Fishers, Planters and Merchants in Notre Dame Bay, 1713-1802 (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2012). Out of this thesis research emerged an essay on “A Different Kind of Newfoundland: Planter Success in 18th-Century Notre Dame Bay,” Newfoundland Quarterly XCIX: 2 (2006): 38-45. Dwyer explores the role played by the Slades, a merchant family which originate in Poole, England, in the development of a society that was increasingly Irish in origin while also stressing the importance that the truck system played in making settlement in Notre Dame Bay possible.

Notwithstanding Mannion's pioneering work on Irish migration to Newfoundland, much remains unknown about the culture of the Irish who settled in Newfoundland either temporarily or permanently. That there was hostility and tension which occasionally burst into the open is undeniable – witness the willingness with which Irish servants supported the French when they captured and briefly held St. John’s and Conception and Trinity Bays in 1762 or the conspiracy in 1800 among Irish soldiers and servants in St. John’s to rise up against the English (both discussed separately in this bibliography in the section dealing with war and military events in Newfoundland). Equally undeniable is the fact that the Irish in Newfoundland suffered legally, socially, and culturally from powerful English prejudices and laws; see John Mannion, "‘...Notoriously disaffected to the Government...’: British allegations of Irish disloyalty in eighteenth-century Newfoundland," Newfoundland Studies XVI: 1 (Spring 2000), 1-29, or, for a study with a narrower focus, Mannion’s examination of the way in which Newfoundland’s links with Ireland served as a vector for revolutionary sentiment, "Transatlantic Disaffection: Wexford and Newfoundland, 1798-1800," Journal of the Wexford Historical Society 17 (1998-1999): 30-60. Not so clear is the source of such prejudices and behaviour. Did they result from anti-Irish feelings, anti-Catholic feelings, or strong class antipathies? Aidan O’Hara, for instance, places much of the blame for the conspiracy among the Irish members of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment of Fencibles in 1800 on the anti-Irish attitudes of their military commander, General John Skerret; see “‘The entire island is United...’: the attempted United Irish rising in Newfoundland, 1800,” History Ireland, VIII: 1 (2000), 18-21; see also the essay on Skerret by G.W.L. Nicholson in the DCB, V, 761-762. The truth, of course, lies in an amalgam of these several prejudices that is much more complicated than many simplistic discussions of Irish-English relations in Newfoundland will admit. Nor, as Keith Mathews points out in his dissertation, is it always recognized that the Irish in Newfoundland were treated no worse, and sometimes better, than their compatriots and co-religionists in Ireland. Nevertheless, while the toleration of Roman Catholicism by 1784 does suggest that prejudices were easing (see below for a discussion of sources relating to Roman Catholicism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland), other evidence suggests that the emerging legal structure in Newfoundland by the end of the eighteenth century simply created new situations which worked against Irish Catholics. In "Collective Violence in Ferryland District, Newfoundland, in 1788," Dalhousie Law Journal XXI: 2 (Fall 1998): 475-489, Christopher English examines the transition from locally-defined definition of law and application of laws to definitions decreed from London. He explores this transition through one incident – the trial and sentencing in Ferryland of 114 men found guilty in 1788 of "riotous assembly" – and suggests that the rough-and-tumble violence and faction-fighting which had previously been had tolerated among Irish labourers were now singled out and suppressed in district courts by local elites who were anxious thereby to maintain their social position and economic power in the face of the centralizing policies of the imperial state. As Jerry Bannister suggests in The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 235, the reaction of Protestant elites was “a by-product of the forces unleashed by the edict of religious toleration in 1784 and the efforts to establish the Roman Catholic Church in Newfoundland.” What is certain is that students must exercise extreme caution when analysing social tensions in eighteenth-century Newfoundland, and avoid explanations that assign purely class-based, ethnically based, or sectarian explanations to tensions and behaviours.

One unusual and quite atypical Irish migration experience occurred in 1789, when 127 Irish convicts were put ashore at Bay Bulls and Petty Harbour by the captain of the Dublin-owned brig Duke of Leinster. The British authorities had practised convict transportation to North America before the American Revolution and would resume the practice in more infamous fashion late in the 1780s with Australia as the destination. Transportation to Newfoundland was never encouraged by the British government, in part because this would conflict with the island's imperial role as a fishery and "nursery for seamen." Nevertheless, convicts did occasionally appear in the fishery during the early eighteenth century. Then, and in emulation of the British practice of transportation, the Irish government attempted after 1784 to ship convicts off to North America and the Caribbean. The fact that one ship-load ended up in Newfoundland in 1789 was quite unintended, and generated considerable concern and official correspondence both by local authorities and British officials in Newfoundland. This incident has therefore received some attention by historians, first by Frederic F. Thompson in a brief article entitled "Transportation of convicts to Newfoundland, 1789-1793," Newfoundland Quarterly LXIX: 1(1960): 30-1, and later more detailed attention from Ged Martin in "Convict Transportation to Newfoundland in 1789," Acadiensis V: 1 (Autumn 1975): 84-99. Stephen Devereux places the incident within the context of Irish and British politics in "Irish Convict Transportation and the Reach of the State in Late Hanoverian Britain," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, New Ser. Vol. VIII (St. John's 1997): 61-85. An analysis by Bob Reece places the incident within the context of tensions that affected the Irish Catholic community in Newfoundland at the time the convicts appeared; see "‘Such a Banditti': Irish Convicts in Newfoundland, 1789, Part I," Newfoundland Studies XIII: 1 (Spring 1997): 1-29; Part II: Newfoundland Studies XIII: 2 (Autumn 1998): 127-141; and the material relating to Newfoundland in Reece's book, The Origins of Irish Convict Transportation to New South Wales (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Reece shows how the unexpected arrival of the convicts in a society which lacked the judicial, social, or administrative machinery to integrate them into the local community society compelled local authorities to act quickly to deport the convicts, not completely with success. However, Jerry Bannister maintains that both Reece and Martin reinforce a number of misconceptions about the government and judiciary in Newfoundland at this time. Framing his analysis in terms of the broader legal historiography, Bannister maintains in "Convict Transportation and the Colonial State in Newfoundland, 1789," Acadiensis XXVII: 2 (Spring 1998): 95-123, that the way in which the local authorities coped with the sudden appearance of the convicts indicates that a system of local governance had emerged in Newfoundland by 1789 that was quite capable of meeting this challenge.

Ironically, while the arrival of the Irish convicts in 1789 was something of an aberration in the general history of immigration to Newfoundland, the event is quite well documented, and for this reason, it has attracted scholarly attention. Not nearly as much is known about out-migration from Newfoundland during the eighteenth century, especially to New England, though there were persistent complaints by eighteenth-century officials – see DCB, II (1701-1740) essays about Thomas Kempthorne (he served as commodore in 1715), and William Arnold (master of a New England trading sloop accused of illegally transporting fishermen to New England). As a result, historians from Prowse to Lounsbury assumed that the flow was substantial. Daniel Vickers includes some material on late seventeenth and early eighteenth century migration from Newfoundland to New England in his article on "Work and Life on the Fishing Periphery of Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1675," in David Grayson Allen and David D. Hall (eds.), Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984), pp. 83-117, as well as in his more detailed and thorough treatment of labour in colonial New England, Farmers & Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Andrew Rolfson also discusses the movement of servants from Newfoundland to the mainland North American colonies in Land Tenure, Landowners, and Servitude on the Early-Eighteenth Century English Shore (M.A. research paper, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2004). As well, such migration has been discussed within the more general context of Newfoundland's links with New England; see Susan E. Squires, "Newfoundland to the Boston States: Seasonal Cross-Border Migration," in Borderlands Project Steering Committee (Robert Lecker, Co-ordinating editor), Borderlands: Essays in Canadian-American Relations (Toronto: ECW Press, 1991), pp. 127-145. However, users of this article should be extremely careful in their use of the general background provided by Squires, for she accepts uncritically many of the hoary myths of Newfoundland history, including the "fishery/settler animosity" myth, and seems unaware of the degree to which merchants are now recognized as vital factors in the establishment of a settled population on the island.

In demonstrating that the development of a commercial network in Newfoundland during the eighteenth century was an essential ingredient in the development and growth of a permanent, residential population, the work of Handcock, Mannion, Head, Matthews, and others has overturned the traditional perception of merchants as unrelenting foes of settlement. It has also influenced subsequent research on settlement in Newfoundland. Thus, Allan Dwyer has explored the sometimes complicated relationship that existed between planters and merchants, first in his Master’s thesis, An Economic Profile of Fogo Island Planters and the Slade Merchant Company, 1785-1805 (MA thesis, McGill University, 1989), and later, with a broader timeframe, in his doctoral dissertation, Atlantic Borderland: Natives, Fishers, Planters and Merchants in Notre Dame Bay, 1713-1802 (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2012). Students can access Dwyer's interpretation through his paper, “A Different Kind of Newfoundland: Planter Success in 18th-Century Notre Dame Bay,” Newfoundland Quarterly XCIX: 2 (2006): 38-45. Dwyer also uses the opportunity of his analysis of a letter written by their agents in St. John’s to the firm of John Slade and Sons in 1799 to discuss British expansion into the Notre Dame Bay region during the early eighteenth century, when that territory was still defined as "French Shore." See "Research Note: Fogo Island and the French in Italy: A Letter from the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World," Newfoundland and Labrador Studies XXI: 2 (Fall 2006), 309-318

In a very different part of Newfoundland, Olaf Janzen also emphasizes the role played by merchants – this time merchants of St. Malo, France – in establishing and maintaining Franco-Irish settlements in southwestern Newfoundland in "`Une Grande Liaison': French Fishermen from Ile Royale on the Coast of Southwestern Newfound land, 1714-1766 – A Preliminary Survey," Newfoundland Studies III: 2(Fall 1987): 183-200 and in "`Bretons...sans scrupule': The Family Chenu of St. Malo and the Illicit Trade in Cod During the Middle of the 18th Century," in Patricia Galloway and Philip Boucher (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society Martinique and Guadeloupe, May 1989 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), pp. 189-200; a revised version of this paper later appeared in the International Journal of Maritime History VIII: 1 (June 1996), pp. 1-22 under the title "The Illicit Trade in English Cod into Spain, 1739-1748." Two more essays unite the metropolitan and Newfoundland foci of these earlier essays, and carry the story of the settlements of southwestern Newfoundland forward into the 1750s and 1760s; see Olaf Janzen, “‘Une petite Republique’ in Southwestern Newfoundland: The Limits of Imperial Authority in a Remote Maritime Environment,” in People of the Northern Seas ("Research in Maritime History," No. 3; St. John's, NF: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1992), ed. Lewis R. Fischer and Walter Minchinton, pp. 1-33, and “Un Petit Dérangement: The Eviction of French Fishermen from Newfoundland in 1755.” This last essay appears in Olaf U. Janzen, War and Trade in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland (“Research in Maritime History,” No. 52; St. John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2013), pp. 119-128, together with reprints of the first two essays, “Illicit Trade” (pp. 99-118) and “Une petite republique” (pp. 69-97).

Yet year-round residency also required innovative measures by the inhabitants themselves if they were to survive, especially through the long and difficult winter. Though our attention on year-round survival is understandably focussed on Newfoundland’s rich abundance of marine resources, Rainer Baehre reminds us that the timber resources of its forests played a sufficiently important role in Newfoundland history that customs and regulations quickly defined how those forests could – and could not – be used and abused; see "Whose Pine-Clad Hills: Forest Rights and Access in Newfoundland and Labrador’s History," Newfoundland Quarterly CIII: 4 (Spring 2011): 42-47. David Collins surveys the way in which the island interior of Newfoundland went through several changes in the perceptions of the early European inhabitants – from unrealistic expectations of agricultural abundance, to ominous threat from natives and Europeans alike, to a source of essential shelter and resources during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as people began to turn to the interior in winter for survival; see "Foe, Friend and Fragility: Evolving Settler Interactions with the Newfoundland Wilderness," British Journal of Canadian Studies XXI: 1 (May 2008): 35-62. Anthropologist Philip E.L. Smith has given the practice of "winter-housing" – in which residents of coastal villages fragmented into family units and dispersed into the interior to subsist on hunting and trapping during the winter – particular attention. While the practice closely resembled the subsistence pattern of the Beothuk Indians, Smith argues convincingly that it was not borrowed but was instead independently invented by Newfoundland settlers in response to the harsh environmental conditions they found there as well as in response to the peculiar social and political conditions that prevailed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See "In Winter Quarters," Newfoundland Studies III: 1 (Spring 1987): 1-36, "Transhumant Europeans Overseas: The Newfoundland Case," Current Anthropology XXVIII: 2 (April 1987): 241-50, and, most recently, "Transhumance among European settlers in Atlantic Canada," Geographical Journal CLXI: 1 (March 1995): 79-86. This is not to deny that some elements of native material culture were transferred to European settlers. Melvin Firestone describes "Inuit Derived Culture Traits in Northern Newfoundland" in an article in Arctic Anthropology XXIX: 1 (1992): 112-128. Though the article focuses largely on the twentieth century, the opening pages include an extremely comprehensive and accurate survey of Inuit-European relations in the Straits of Belle Isle region that extends back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The commercial harvesting of new resources also had a profound and immediate effect on permanent demographic patterns, according to Chesley Sanger in "The Evolution of Sealing and the Spread of Permanent Settlement in Northeastern Newfoundland," in J. Mannion (ed.), The Peopling of Newfoundland, pp. 136-151; this article emerged out of research for Sanger’s Master’s dissertation, Technological and Spatial Adaptation in the Newfoundland Seal Fishery During the 19th Century (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1973). A brief overview of the history of the seal fishery, from its earliest origins to its development into an activity of great commercial and social significance, is provided in James K. Hiller, "The Newfoundland Seal Fishery: An Historical Introduction," Bulletin of Canadian Studies VII: 2 (Winter 1983/84): 49-72, though a much more comprehensive study is Shannon Ryan's The Ice Hunters: A History of Newfoundland Sealing to 1914 (St. John's: Breakwater, 1994). Curiously, opportunistic sealing may have been more critical in supporting the initial stages of permanent settlement on the north-east coast rather than later, more established phases of the settlement process; see Allan Dwyer's two dissertations (previously mentioned) as well as his paper, “A Different Kind of Newfoundland: Planter Success in 18th-Century Notre Dame Bay,” Newfoundland Quarterly XCIX: 2 (2006): 38-45. The salmon fishery was another activity that drew residents beyond the traditional settlement areas even as it provided them with another resource to exploit. For a study of one pioneer in the salmon fishery, see Hans Rollmann, "`Thy Real Friend George Skeffington:' Quaker and Salmon Fishing Pioneer in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland," The Journal of the Friends' Historical Society LVII: 1 (1994): 13- 20, as well as Carson Ritchie's brief treatment of Skeffington in David Hayne (gen. ed.), Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. II: 1701 to 1740 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 609.

Other developments which broadened the resource basis on which population growth could rest are more prosaic. Grant Head hints at a connection between the appearance of the potato in Newfoundland in the middle of the eighteenth century and the growth thereafter of a permanent population, in his Eighteenth Century Newfoundland: A Geographer's Perspective (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1976). It is an intriguing possibility – there seems little doubt that for many decades before 1730, the permanent population on the island of Newfoundland remained fairly consistently at a level of roughly 1,000 to 2,000 people, and that then, around the same time that Head believes the potato made its appearance, the population began to expand rapidly and persistently. Was there a “cause and effect”? It is highly unlikely that the persistent growth of permanent population in Newfoundland can be attributed to a single factor such as the appearance of the potato. And until some serious research is undertaken, any connection between population growth and the introduction of the potato to Newfoundland must remain speculative – intriguing, yes, but speculative.

In any case, most crops grown in Newfoundland during the eighteenth century were part of a household subsistence economy; commercial agriculture developed late and only under special circumstances, according to Robert A. MacKinnon; see his MA dissertation, The Growth of Commercial Agriculture Around St. John's, 1800-1935: A Study of Local Trade in Response to Urban Demand (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1981), from which he later drew two articles: “Farming the Rock: The Evolution of Commercial Agriculture around St. John's, Newfoundland, to 1945,” Acadiensis XX: 2 (Spring 1991): 32-61; and “The Agricultural Fringe of St. John’s, 1750-1945,” in Alan G. Macpherson (ed.), Four Centuries and the City: Perspectives on the Historical Geography of St. John’s (St. John’s: Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2005), pp. 53-81. In “The Staple Model Reconsidered: The Case of Agricultural Policy in Northeast Newfoundland, 1785-1855,” Acadiensis XXI: 2 (Spring 1992): 48-71, Sean Cadigan puts to rest the old myth that government and the merchant community were opposed to agricultural development, but he shows that the politicization of agricultural development by early nineteenth century reformers, together with the desire of colonial administrators to reduce public dependence on relief whenever the fishery failed, created unreasonable expectations about the island's agricultural potential. In his essay on "Patrick Morris and Newfoundland Irish Immigration," in Cyril Byrne and Margaret Harry (eds.), Talamh an Eisc; Canadian and Irish Essays (Halifax: Nimbus, 1986), pp. 180-202, John Mannion analyses the particular efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, of one merchant to promote agricultural development and settlement in the early nineteenth century. Mannion also describes the career of one Irish farmer in Newfoundland, John O'Brien, in the DCB, VIII: 658-660. In the meantime, so long as the island population exceeded the island’s ability to feed itself, Newfoundland continued to depend on importations of food stuffs. While those imports continued to come from Great Britain, a growing quantity of food-stuffs came from other parts of North America, both that part of Anglo-America which became the United States and the mainland British colonies that eventually became part of Canada. The American trade has received some attention from Grant Head, Gordon Handcock, Keith Matthews and others. The trade with nearby British colonies has been given much less attention, and is one of those neglected areas that awaits scholarly study. For instance, Corey Slumkoski hints at the importance of the trade in agricultural produce between Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland in the early nineteenth century in an article that is otherwise focused firmly on the twentieth century; see “The Prince Edward Island - Newfoundland Beef-Cattle Trade, 1942-1946,” Acadiensis XXXV: 2 (Spring 2006): 106-126.

The Emergence of a Newfoundland Society

Despite the growing interest in the social history of early Newfoundland, one group has consistently been ignored to the point where they remain almost entirely invisible. The history of women has simply not been given any attention until very recently. Peter Pope gives the topic some discussion in his Fish Into Wine, while Gordon Handcock acknowledges the crucial role played by women in transforming Newfoundland from a seasonal migration of men to a permanent society in Soe longe as there comes noe women: Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland (St. John’s: Breakwater Press, 1989). Yet Handcock is frustratingly elusive in explaining when and how the female population grew to significant levels. There is growing evidence that the onset of significant Irish migration to Newfoundland may have played an important role in introducing significant numbers of single women to Newfoundland; see for instance the references to Irish female immigration in John Mannion, “Irish Migration and Settlement in Newfoundland: The Formative Phase, 1697-1732,” Newfoundland Studies XVII: 2 (Fall 2001): 257-293. Mannion also touches on the theme in portions of his essay, “Population and Economy: Geographical Perspectives on Newfoundland in 1732,” Newfoundland & Labrador Studies XXVIII: 2 (Fall 2013): 219-265. Even so, the size of the female population as a proportion of the total was quite small during the eighteenth century – perhaps 13 percent of the total in 1750, and barely double that by the end of that century.

All this has a bearing, not only on the economic role of women, but on their legal and social status as well. One of the first assessments of the legal status of women in Newfoundland was “A Woman’s Lot: Women and Law in Newfoundland from Early Settlement to the Twentieth Century” by Linda Cullum and Maeve Baird, with assistance from Cynthia Penney, in Pursuing Equality: Historical Perspectives on Women in Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John's: ISER, 1993), ed. Linda Kealey, pp. 66-162. Yet theirs is a very broad treatment of its subject, covering the eighteenth century to the present, and the attention given to the earlier period can be very elusive of detail.

This is now beginning to change. A very important contribution to the history of women in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century Newfoundland is The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, 1750-1860 by Willeen Gertrude Keough (New York: Columbia University Press), which is based on Keough’s doctoral dissertation, The slender thread: Irish women on the southern Avalon, 1750-1860 (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001); perhaps more importantly, the book is also available as part of the Gutenberg-e project free of charge as an open access work at http://www.gutenberg-e.org/keough/kew09.html. Keough uses a broad range of sources – official correspondence, court transcripts, oral history – to shed light on the migration of Irish women to Newfoundland, their reception and status, the way in which they shaped local society, and contributed to the emergence of a vigorous residential population. Though her study extends over more than a century, her analysis is particularly rich for the periods of greatest Irish migration to Newfoundland, 1811-16 and 1825-33. Keough’s dissertation has not only generated a book but also a number of article-length papers which explore some of the themes that are developed by the larger works. See for example "The Riddle of Peggy Mountain: Regulation of Irish Women’s Sexuality on the Southern Avalon, 1750-1860," Acadiensis XXXI: 2 (Spring 2002): 38-70; "‘...Now You Vagabond [W]hore I Have You’: Plebian Women, Assault Cases, and Gender and Class Relations on the Southern Avalon, 1750-1860," in Christopher English (ed.), Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. 9. Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2005), pp. 237-271; and “Unpacking the Discursive Irish Woman Immigrant in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland,” Irish Studies Review, XXI: 1 (2013): 55-70. Through the lens of the experience of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish women in Newfoundland, Keough explores a number of questions relating to the status and condition of women, particularly those of the working classes.

Two other studies that examine attitudes toward, and conditions of, women in the eighteenth century and the way this affected the administration of justice are Andrew Rolfson’s Land Tenure, Landowners, and Servitude on the Early-Eighteenth Century English Shore (M.A. research paper, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2004) and Sean Cadigan’s "Whipping them into Shape: State Refinement of Patriarchy among Conception Bay Fishing Families, 1787-1825," in C. McGrath, B. Neis, and M. Porter (eds.), Their Lives and Times: Women in Newfoundland and Labrador: A Collage (St. John's: Killick Press, 1995), pp. 48-59. Jerry Bannister suggests convincingly that women in eighteenth-century Newfoundland, as in Georgian England, were more likely to be granted mercy by the legal system than men because how seriously offenders were treated by the courts depended on the perceived seriousness of their offence and the character of the offender, and women were perceived as posing a less serious threat than men; see Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), esp. "Women and Criminal Justice," pp. 200-204. In “Women in the Courts of Placentia District, 1757-1823,” Krista L. Simon uses nearly 600 court cases to explore the legal and social status of women in one region of Newfoundland; the essay appears in Christopher English (ed.), Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. 9. Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2005), pp. 272-299

Other promising indications of what is possible include a paper by Trudi Johnson which examines the tension between the needs of an emerging settled population and British legal structures and preferences; see “‘A Matter of Custom and Convenience’: Marriage Law in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Studies XIX: 2 (June 2003): 282-296.Johnson later explored women’s inheritance and property rights in “Defining Property for Inheritance: The Chattels Real Estate Act of 1834,” in Christopher English (ed.), Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. 9. Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2005), pp. 192-216. These publications all offer encouraging proof that the available sources still have a great deal to tell us about the history of women in early modern Newfoundland. Nevertheless, much work needs to be done before women's history within this region can catch up to the progress made in other regions of pre-Confederation Canada.

Before we move on to Newfoundland’s transition to a predominantly residential population, there is one other group of people who were present in Newfoundland, though not necessarily by choice, and certainly not in great numbers. In fact, very little is known about the numbers of blacks who were here as slaves, either in the areas of British settlement or in the French communities before 1713. Yet Africans made up a huge proportion of the migrants who came to North America from the early 1600s onwards – admittedly as involuntary and forced labour – and it should come as no surprise that some were recorded in Newfoundland. What is surprising is how very little attention has been given to them. Only one essay touches upon the presence of enslaved Africans in Newfoundland – this is a brief research note by Heather MacLeod-Leslie on “Archaeology and Atlantic Canada’s African Diaspora” which appeared in Acadiensis XLIII: 1 (Winter/Spring 2014): 137-145; see especially p. 144. Those blacks who do appear in the documentary record seem to have been here as personal servants rather than as labourers in the fisheries. Nevertheless, more work should be done on their presence here, if only because there were other reasons for their being here than we generally appreciate – as chattel belonging to merchants residing in Newfoundland, or as a consequence of the emerging fish trade with the West Indies, or as part of the Atlantic realm’s maritime seafaring labour force – see for example W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African-American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) as well as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000) – or simply as transients who occasionally found themselves brought ashore because so much shipping to and from the West Indies made its way off these coasts.

Returning to our main theme, the proportion of permanent residents to temporary or seasonal ones grew steadily until finally, during the American Revolutionary War, the residential population permanently exceeded the non-residential one. There has been considerable interest in characterizing the society that emerged with this growth. Wilfred Kerr's description of "Newfoundland in the Period Before the American Revolution," in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography LXV (January 1941): 56-78, provided the platform on which was based an explanation for the failure of the residential population to be moved by the passions aroused by the American Revolution. That explanation no longer stands the test of close scrutiny, for Newfoundland simply lacked the homogeneity and unity that would have made a coherent and conscious response of any kind by its residential population possible. Contemporary impressions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Newfoundland, such as appear in Peter Neary and Patrick O'Flaherty (eds.), By Great Waters: A Newfoundland and Labrador Anthology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), Peter Pope, "A True and Faithful Account: Newfoundland in 1680," Newfoundland Studies XII: 1+2 (Spring and Fall 1996), pp. 32-49, Rene Wicks, "Newfoundland Social Life: 1750-1850," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXX: 4 (Fall 1974): 17-23, A.M. Lysaght (ed.), Joseph Banks in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1766; His Diary, Manuscripts and Collections (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), and Jean Murray (ed.), The Newfoundland Journal of Aaron Thomas 1794 (Don Mills: Longmans, 1968), all make very clear that the population lacked the means, let alone the sense, of cohesion or homogeneity of expression. Only as the eighteenth century drew to a close did this change, a process which Shannon Ryan examines in "Fishery to Colony: A Newfoundland Watershed, 1793-1815," Acadiensis XII: 2(Spring 1983): 34-52 and which has been reprinted in all three editions of Acadiensis Reader: Volume One, Atlantic Canada Before Confederation (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1985, 1990, 1998), edited by P.A. Buckner, David Frank, and (the third edition) Gail G. Campbell (pp. 130-148, 138-156 and 177-195 respectively).

By the time the wars of 1793-1815 drew to a close, the migratory fishery was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Yet the disappearance of seasonal labour did not bring an end to the migration of people – particularly the Irish – to Newfoundland. The end of the artificial prosperity of wartime and the return of peacetime competition was both sudden and traumatic; see James Flynn, "The effects of the War of 1812 on the Newfoundland economy, with an additional comment on post-war depression," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXXVII (Summer/Fall 1981): 67-72 as well Ryan’s aforementioned article, "Fishery to Colony." As a result, the massive flow of immigrants that characterized the final years of war suddenly fell off dramatically. But immigration did not end completely, and in fact would experience one more surge in 1825-1833, when changes in British regulations governing trans-Atlantic migration, combined with the seeming recovery of the fishing economy in the decades after 1816, created conditions that revitalized the flow of people from Ireland to Newfoundland. Conditions for migrants during these times could be deplorable, for the profits to be made by transporting people across the Atlantic were substantial, and attracted both the srcupulous and the unscrupulous. See Willeen Gertrude Keough, The Slender Thread: Irish Women on the Southern Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, 1750-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press), also available on-line at <http://www.gutenberg-e.org/keough/kew09.html>, especially Chapter 2. Cyril Byrne wrote briefly about two cases – one in 1811, another in 1825 – of migrants being victimized by the passenger trade; see "The Case of the Schooner Fanny from Waterford to St. John’s, 1811," An Nasc: the newsletter of the D'Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies, Saint Mary's University III: 1 (Spring/Summer 1990): 19-22; and "The Brig Thomas Farrell," An Nasc: the newsletter of the D'Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies, Saint Mary's University IV: 1 (Winter 1991): 6-7.

Ironically, significant migration to Newfoundland from the British Isles came to an end just as the "Great Migration" to British North America began. By the late 1830s, patterns of population distribution in Newfoundland had therefore become fixed, and growth thereafter was derived largely through natural increase. Yet these patterns remained strongly influenced by the traditional merchant fishery, as John Mannion and W. Gordon Handcock explain in Plate 8, "Origins of the Newfoundland Population, 1836," in HAC, II. Within the communities themselves, certain social characteristics had become well-established by then. In two essays by Tom Nemec on "Trepassey, 1505-1840 A.D.: The Emergence of an Anglo-Irish Newfoundland Outport" and "Trepassey, 1840-1900: An Ethnohistorical Reconstruction of Anglo-Irish Outport Society," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXIX: 4 (March 1973): 17-28 and LXX: 1 (June 1973): 15-24, as well as in W. Gordon Handcock's study of "The Poole Mercantile Community and the Growth of Trinity 1700-1839," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXXX: 3 (Winter 1985): 19-30, the same conclusion is reached: class differences rather than economic or religious differences were the major bases of social divisions within each community. Even in Ferryland, where Christopher English does believe that religion played a part in feeding social tensions, the fundamental conflict was more one of class; see his "Collective Violence in Ferryland District, Newfoundland, in 1788" in the Dalhousie Law Journal XXI: 2 (Fall 1998): 475-489.

Fundamental to any understanding of such differences within local societies is an understanding of the "truck system," through which merchants from the eighteenth century onwards controlled labour through a system of wage payment in supplies. An excellent explanation of the truck system appears in various portions of Rosemary Ommer, From Outpost to Outport: A Structural Analysis of the Jersey - Gaspé Cod Fishery, 1767-1886 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), though the complexities of the debate surrounding the truck system are better appreciated by reading the essays appearing in Rosemary Ommer (ed.), Merchant Credit & Labour Strategies in Historical Perspective (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1990). The essays include: J.K. Hiller, "The Newfoundland Credit System: an Interpretation," pp. 86-101, Robert M. Lewis, "The Survival of the Planters' Fishery in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Newfoundland," pp. 102-113, and David A. Macdonald, "They Cannot Pay Us in Money: Newman and Company and the Supplying System in the Newfoundland Fishery, 1850-1884," pp. 114-128, which first appeared in Acadiensis XIX: 1(Autumn 1989): 142-55. Possibly the most useful essay on the theme did not appear in Merchant Credit & Labour at all, but instead was a review of the collection by Stuart Pierson in Newfoundland Studies VIII: 1(Spring 1992): 90-108. Pierson's essay is a thoughtful discourse on the ambivalency with which merchants, credit, "truck," etc. are increasingly perceived.

The problem was that it was extremely difficult not to believe that the truck system was completely exploitive and prone to abuse. British officials therefore became convinced that this contributed to the transformation of the fishery from a seasonal to a residential activity; see John E. Crowley, "Empire versus Truck: The Official Interpretation of Debt and Labour in the Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland Fishery," Canadian Historical Review, LXX: 3 (September 1989): 311-36. One perceived abuse was the degree to which rum from the West Indies was used as a cheap substitute for the payment of wages, a problem that predated even the truck system. Yet according to Peter Pope, the role alcohol played within the fishery and trade was not nearly so clear-cut. Instead, alcohol had two aspects, representing a "culturally useful good" to the labouring consumer and "an economically efficient return for fish" to the supplying merchant; see Peter Pope, "Historical Archaeology and the Demand for Alcohol in 17th Century Newfoundland," Acadiensis XIX: 1(Autumn 1989): 72-90, as well as his "Fish into Wine: The Historical Anthropology of Demand for Alcohol in Seventeenth-Century Newfoundland," Histoire Sociale/Social History XXVII: 54 (November 1994): 261-278, two papers which were subsequently integrated into Pope’s socioeconomic history of seventeenth-century Newfoundland, Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

That truck could be a positive and constructive element in the early history of Newfoundland has been demonstrated by Allan Dwyer in his Master’s thesis, An Economic Profile of Fogo Island Planters and the Slade Merchant Company, 1785-1805 (MA thesis, McGill University, 1989), and, more recently, Atlantic Borderland: Natives, Fishers, Planters and Merchants in Notre Dame Bay, 1713-1802 (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2012), as well as in “A Different Kind of Newfoundland: Planter Success in 18th-Century Notre Dame Bay,” Newfoundland Quarterly XCIX: 2 (2006): 38-45. Joshua Tavenor contributes to the debate with a research note that briefly defines the nature of the commodities that the fishermen and residents of Newfoundland consumed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; see "Imports to Newfoundland in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," Newfoundland and Labrador Studies XXVI: 1 (Spring 2011): 75-85.

Nevertheless, truck was increasingly perceived as a negative and exploitive relationship, and by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, efforts were being made to overturn it, though Sean Cadigan maintains that the development of a wages and lien system in the early-nineteenth century had less to do with such efforts than with structural changes within the fishing society itself; see "Seamen, Fishermen and the Law: The Role of the Wages and Lien System in the Decline of Wage Labour in the Newfoundland Fishery," in Colin Howell and Richard Twomey (eds.), Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1991), pp. 105-31. That article has since been incorporated by Cadigan into his much fuller treatment of the truck system, Hope and Deception in Conception Bay: Merchant- Settler Relations in Newfoundland, 1785-1855 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

Clearly, there is no longer any excuse for students to indulge in the stereotype of the grasping, greedy, and destructively exploitive robber barons; this image has been firmly rejected. Yet it is equally clear that a consensus has not yet replaced that image. There is, for instance, still a tendency to perceive the merchants as responsible for Newfoundland's lack of economic diversification. And it is true that, since they were not permanent residents of Newfoundland before the nineteenth century, the profits generated by the fishery never remained in Newfoundland but flowed instead to the British Isles where the wealth was used to support an ostentatious way of life and political ambitions. It is a point made quite graphically in the well illustrated book by Derek Beamish, John Hillier, and H.F.V. Johnstone, Mansions & Merchants of Poole & Dorset, Volume I (Poole: Poole Historical Trust, 1976). The consequences to the economic development, or underdevelopment, of Newfoundland are also the focus of an essay by James F. Shepherd, "Staples and Eighteenth-Century Canadian Development: The Case of Newfoundland," in Roger L. Ransom, Richard Sutch, and Gary M. Walton (eds.), Explorations in the New Economic History: Essays in Honor of Douglass C. North (London: Academic Press, 1982), pp. 97-124. Yet in Hope and Deception in Conception Bay: Merchant-Settler Relations in Newfoundland, 1785-1855 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), Sean Cadigan denies that the merchants obstructed diversification and seeks to explain the failure of capital to accumulate in Newfoundland in environmental conditions and in the complex and inescapable characteristics of the truck system.

The division of the resident population of Newfoundland into equal proportions of English Protestants and Irish Roman Catholics, together with the role that religious organizations have played in alleviating the more extreme social conditions on the island, have resulted in considerable interest in the religious history of Newfoundland. The Royal Navy, whose duty it was to patrol, monitor, and protect the fishery since roughly the middle of the seventeenth century, was also responsible for providing early residents with access to spiritual support through the chaplains who often served on naval ships. Almost the only source on this usually unrecognized role that the navy played is Waldo E.L. Smith, The Navy and Its Chaplains in the Days of Sail (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1961), pp. 160-189: "The Navy as Moral Guardian: Newfoundland." The impressions of a cleric visiting Newfoundland in 1680 have been published, with a fine introductory essay and annotations by Peter Pope, as "A True and Faithful Account: Newfoundland in 1680," in Newfoundland Studies XII: 1+2 (Spring and Fall 1996), pp. 32-49. The activities of John Jackson, a chaplain who arrived at St. John's with the military early in the eighteenth century, are described in the DCB (II: 293-294). With the exception of sporadic visits to Newfoundland by clergymen and preachers during the seventeenth century, the first concerted effort to provide Newfoundland with religious service was by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England. Ruth M. Christensen surveyed the work of the SPG during this period in "The Establishment of S.P.G. Missions in Newfoundland, 1703- 1783," Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church XX (1951): 207-229. An excellent impression of the challenges that SPG missionaries faced in Newfoundland is provided by several biographical essays in the DCB on Henry Jones (III: 315-316), Robert Kilpatrick (III: 327), Edward Langman (IV: 437-438) and James Balfour (V: 52-53).

There is also a growing and welcome body of scholarly research on Methodism in Newfoundland. For many years, much of the available literature was uncritical and denominationally biased – works like Arthur Kewley, "The First Fifty Years of Methodism in Newfoundland: 1765-1815," Canadian Church Historical Society Journal XIX: 1-2 (March-June 1977): 6-26, and Naboth Winsor, Hearts Strangely Warmed; A History of Methodism in Newfoundland 1765-1925, Volume One: The Beginning and Firm Establishment 1765-1824 (Gander: B.S.C. Printers, 1982), had to be consulted with great care because of their antiquarian approach. Students seeking a more analytical assessment of early Methodist preachers were limited to brief essays in the DCB like that on Laurence Coughlan in vol. IV. An MA dissertation by Jacob Parsons on The Origin and Growth of Newfoundland Methodism, 1765-1855 (MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1964) was a start, but is now showing its age. Fortunately we now have Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774-1874 by Calvin Hollett (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); this is based on Hollett’s PhD thesis (Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2008), A People Reaching for Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774-1874.

On the role of Dissenters in early Newfoundland society, one should consult James S. Armour, Religious Dissent in St. John's, 1775-1815 (MA thesis, MUN, 1989). Hans Rollmann has also published research into the early appearance of Congregationalists and other Dissenters; see, for instance, his "John Jones, James O'Donel, and the Question of Religious Tolerance in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland: A Correspondence," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXXX: 1 (Summer 1984): 23-27, and his essays on "Puritans" and "Quakers" in the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador [hereafter cited as ENL] (St. John's: Harry Cuff, 1992). An essay on John Jones by Frederic Thompson also appears in the DCB, IV: 401-402.

The most comprehensive introduction to the study of Roman Catholicism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland is "Catholicism and Colonial Policy in Newfoundland, 1779-1845" by Raymond J. Lahey, in Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (eds.), Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750-1930 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), pp. 49-78. While the survey is somewhat traditional and should therefore be used with caution, it manages to cover the social, constitutional and cultural themes both thoroughly and accurately. More recently, Luca Codignola has examined the response of Roman Catholicism throughout the North Atlantic to the political and intellectual trends that saw an intensification of conservatism during a revolutionary age, and therefore provided a broader "Atlantic" context for the local developments that occurred in Newfoundland towards the end of the eighteenth century; see Luca Codignola, "Roman Catholic Conservatism in a New North Atlantic World, 1760-1829," William & Mary Quarterly, 3^rd series, LXIV: 4 (October 2007), pp. 717-756. By reading Codignola’s essay, students will possibly be better prepared to examine one of the most significant developments in the history of Roman Catholicism in Newfoundland, namely the granting of official religious tolerance in 1784, a development which opened the door to the subsequent establishment of an organized Catholic Church on the island. Hans Rollmann has written several extremely useful essays on this process, including "Richard Edwards, John Campbell, and the Proclamation of Religious Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXXX: 2(Fall 1984): 4-12 and "Religious Enfranchisement and Roman Catholics in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland," in C. Byrne & T. Murphy (eds.), Religion and Identity: The Experience of Irish and Scottish Catholics in Atlantic Canada (St. John's: Jesperson Press, 1987), pp. 34-52. Rollmann has also edited and published on-line (http://www.mun.ca/rels/ang/texts/instruct.html) the "Religious Instructions to Governors of Newfoundland: 1729-1786."

The first priest to arrive in Newfoundland following the proclamation of official tolerance of Roman Catholicism was James Louis O'Donnell, whose life has been described in Philip O'Connell, "Dr. James Louis O'Donnell (1737- 1811), first Bishop of Newfoundland," Irish Ecclesiastical Record CIII(1965): 308-324 as well as in the DCB, vol. V: 631-634 and in a Newfoundland Historical Society booklet by Raymond Lahey, James Louis O'Donel in Newfoundland 1784-1807 (St. John's: Newfoundland Historical Society, 1984). Lahey also contributed an essay to the DCB, vol. V, pp. 122-3 on Edmund Burke, who arrived at Placentia in 1785 to serve as the first parish priest there. The open challenge to Burke's presence at Placentia from Prince William Henry, captain of HMS Pegasus, in 1786, and the Prince's subsequent friction with James Louis O'Donel in St. John's, showed how uncertain the footing was of the Catholic clergy in Newfoundland at this time. That footing was further complicated by tensions within and between the Catholic clergy at this time, as Vincent McNally explains in “A Question of Class? Relations Between Bishops and Lay Leaders in Ireland and Newfoundland 1783-1807,” Canadian Catholic Historical Association Historical Studies LXIV (1998), 71-90. The tension between the laity of St. John’s, who were long accustomed to providing the local Catholic community with leadership, and the Catholic clergy who increasingly insisted on being the ‘official’ voice of Newfoundland Catholicism, is also examined by Terrence Murphy in “Trusteeism in Atlantic Canada: The Struggle for Leadership among the Irish Catholics of Halifax, St. John’s, and Saint John, 1780-1850,” in Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (eds.), Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750-1930 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), pp. 126-151. Cyril Byrne has edited a valuable collection of letters by early leaders of Newfoundland's Roman Catholic Church, Gentlemen-Bishops and Faction Fighters: The Letters of Bishops O Donel, Lambert, Scallan and Other Irish Missionaries (St. John's: Jesperson Press, 1984), to which Hans Rollmann has responded with "Gentlemen-Bishops and Faction-Fighters: additional letters pertaining to Newfoundland Catholicism, from the Franciscan Library at Killiney (Ireland)," Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society XXX: 1(April 1988): 3-19.

By the first half of the nineteenth century, religion had become a key ingredient in the public affairs of the emerging society of Newfoundland. Generally the focus of study has been on the interplay of religion and politics during this period; a full discussion of this theme appears later within the context of nineteenth-century Newfoundland society. It should perhaps be noted here, however, that religion could also be a powerful force in creating new communities, albeit "with a careful eye to the fishery and its mercantile organization." See Calvin Hollett, "The Founding of Harbour Buffett, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, 1836-1846: A Popular Initiative in Religion and Education," Newfoundland and Labrador Studies XXIV: 2 (Fall 2009): 199-217.

The Emergence of a Political and Legal Infrastructure

The development of a permanent and growing residential population in Newfoundland also brought with it the need for local institutions of law and government. So long as Newfoundland remained principally and primarily a European commercial activity on the far side of the Atlantic, the institutions that provided some degree of order and consistency were devised by the fishing industry itself. The system of the “fishing admirals,” whereby those who arrived first in a particular harbour assumed responsibility for settling disputes among fishermen, probably pre-dates the English fishery, though most of the existing literature examines only the English experience, and tends to focus on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the fishing admirals were subjected to growing criticism by seasonal naval officers, who felt they were not competent. This perception filtered into official perceptions of the fishery and helped shape the gradual definition of policies, though care should be taken by students in assigning too much meaning into this; "perceptions" were shaped by many things, not the least by political loyalties that often had little to do with the fisheries. See for instance what Alan Cass has to say about the factors that shaped the formulation of King William’s Act of 1699, in his article "Mr. Nisbet’s Legacy, or the Passing of King William’s Act in 1699," Newfoundland and Labrador Studies XXII: 2 (Fall 2007), 505-543. Yet because such perceptions shaped official thinking, they have frequently been embraced by historians and have only recently been challenged. Jerry Bannister, for instance, argues that the role of the fishing admirals in – and contribution to – the administration of Newfoundland requires a much more careful assessment of a very incomplete and always biassed official record. See his articles, “The Fishing Admirals in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Studies XVII: 2 (Fall 2001): 166-219, and “The Naval State in Newfoundland, 1749-1791" in Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, New Series, No. 11 (2000), 17-50, as well as his recent book, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

As Newfoundland society became more permanent and more complex, the need grew more acute for a system of governance more appropriate to a settled society than what the fishing admirals could provide. Yet this need contradicted government's preference for a seasonal fishery whose legal needs could be served when the fishermen returned to England, and whose minimal administrative needs in Newfoundland could then be provided by the fishery itself. This need also contradicted the wishes of the merchants who objected to all innovations that might lead to the imposition of regulations on what was otherwise a "free fishery." Keith Matthews argues in his Lectures on the History of Newfoundland 1500-1800 (St. John's: Breakwater Press, 1988) that this fear of government regulation was what caused merchants to object to settlement, even though they encouraged permanent settlement in Newfoundland through their activities there.

Despite both government and commercial resistance to the introduction of local government, the burgeoning population made some administrative measures necessary. Indeed, at one point the residents of St. John's attempted to establish a political and judicial framework themselves, justifying their actions with reference to the writings of John Locke; the attempt is examined by Jeff Webb in "Leaving the State of Nature: A Locke-Inspired Political Community in St. John's, Newfoundland, 1723," Acadiensis XXI: 1 (Autumn 1991): 156-165. That experiment did not lead immediately to any permanent system of administration or jurisprudence, but before the decade ended, various government-sanctioned ad hoc measures began to make their appearance, of which the most significant was the decision in 1729 to assign civil authority with the rank of "governor" to the naval officer commanding the warships sent out each year to patrol and protect the English fishery at Newfoundland. The naval governor’s powers were carefully defined and limited, yet the need for the application of more extensive powers was such that very soon, a number of ad hoc administrative innovations provided Newfoundland with a rudimentary system of jurisprudence and civil authority.

This process lacked the sanction of parliamentary legislation, so that the conventional view has long been that the system lacked legality; see, for instance, the entries in the ENL on "Government" (Vol. II) and "Judicature" (Vol. III), accounts that should be used very carefully because of their extremely traditional interpretation. It is a view which has undergone substantial revision of late. For instance, in three recent articles, Christopher English has re-visited the evolution of Newfoundland's legal and administrative framework during the eighteenth century: see "The Development of the Newfoundland Legal System to 1815," Acadiensis XX: 1 (Autumn 1990): 89-119; "Newfoundland’s early laws and legal institutions: from fishing admirals to the Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791-92," Manitoba Law Journal XXIII (January 1996), pp. 57-78; and "From Fishery Schooner to Colony: The Legal Development of Newfoundland, 1791-1832," in Louis A. Knafla and Susan W.S. Binnie (eds.), Law, Society, and the State: Essays in Modern Legal History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 73-98. Patrick O'Flaherty presents a very detailed account of government and politics in his monograph, Old Newfoundland: A History to 1843 (St. John’s: Long Beach Press, 1999), although students should exercise some caution in using this work, which one reviewer described as "opinionated, provocative, and idiosyncratic ... with a markedly nationalist slant."

Perhaps more to the point, there still remains a tendency in some of the recent literature to assume that an effective state did not emerge in Newfoundland until the end of the eighteenth century. For instance, in "The Official Mind and Popular Protest in a Revolutionary Era: The Case of Newfoundland, 1789-1819" in F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright (eds.), Canadian State Trials, Volume I: Law, Politics, and Security Measures, 1608-1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 1996), pp. 296-322, Christopher English argues that Newfoundland’s unusual administrative and constitutional status caused Newfoundland’s legal experience during the turbulent years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to differ from that of other parts of the British North Atlantic empire. As English bluntly puts it in the conclusion to that article (p. 317), "Sedition and riot as tools against the state can only be employed when a state is in place." In The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), which is based on his doctoral dissertation, The Custom of the Country: Justice and the Colonial State in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1999), Jerry Bannister takes issue with this approach, arguing that the island’s naval administration needs to be better understood. He maintains that the system of naval administration was both effective and legitimate, that while the system of naval government meant that Newfoundland did not fit easily into traditional historians' simplistic dichotomies defined by colonies with representative government and those without, the law in Newfoundland nevertheless evolved "according to the needs of those in power." For those who lack the time to read Bannister's book, try his article on "Law and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland" in Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (eds.), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 153-174. Another useful article which springs from the pen of Jerry Bannister – and very usefully looks at the way in which one magistrate (Benjamin Lester) administered justice in an eighteenth-century town (Trinity) – is “‘I shall show it to the governor’: Law and Authority in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland.” The essay is published in Christopher Curran and Melvin Baker (eds.), The Face of Justice on Newfoundland's Northeast Coast (St. John's, NL: Law Society of Newfoundland, 2012).

Incidentally, one consequence of Bannister’s re-examination in The Rule of the Admirals of the system of naval governance that developed in eighteenth-century Newfoundland is to give new importance to the role of Capt. George Rodney in that process. Rodney served as station commodore and governor of Newfoundland from 1749 until 1751. Bannister argues that Rodney significantly reformed the system of judicial administration, placing it on “a far more structured footing than ever before.” Before Bannister, most of the attention cast by historians on individual naval governors has focussed on Capt. Hugh Palliser, who served in the 1760s. Ironically, a new published collection of Rodney’s papers which includes his Newfoundland years provides very little insight into the man’s administrative innovation and almost no understanding for the nature of eighteenth-century Newfoundland or its fishery and trade; see David Syrett (ed.), The Rodney Papers: Volume I, 1742-1763: Selections from the Correspondence of Admiral Lord Rodney (NRS Vol. 148; Aldershot, Hants. & Burlington, VT: Ashgate for the Navy Records Society, 2005).

Eventually, the continuing growth and complexity of the population and society of Newfoundland caused the system of naval administration to gave way to a more formal and imperially directed legal system towards the end of the eighteenth century. An important figure in that process was John Reeves, Newfoundland’s first Chief Justice. The best essay on Reeves had long been the article in the DCB (VI: 636-637). Recently, however, there appeared an article by Mark W. Bailey on "John Reeves, Esq. Newfoundland’s First Chief Justice: English Law and Politics in the Eighteenth Century," Newfoundland Studies XIV: 1 (Spring 1998): 28-49; Bailey places Reeves and his measures firmly within the context of eighteenth-century British legal and political culture, even as he also provides a useful survey of legal developments generally, and Reeves’ opinions and actions in particular, in eighteenth-century Newfoundland. In "Collective Violence in Ferryland District, Newfoundland, in 1788" which appeared in the Dalhousie Law Journal XXI: 2 (Fall 1998): 475-489, Chris English uses the trial and sentencing in Ferryland of 114 men found guilty in 1788 of "riotous assembly" to analyse and illustrate the transition from locally-defined definition of law and application of laws to definitions decreed from London. Still another essay by Chris English, "From Fishery Schooner to Colony: The Legal Development of Newfoundland, 1791-1832," in Louis A. Knafla and Susan W.S. Binnie (eds.), Law, Society, and the State: Essays in Modern Legal History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 73-98, is especially thorough in its treatment of the early nineteenth century, and should be considered by anyone venturing into the legal and constitutional context of early Newfoundland colonial society. A particularly intriguing view of eighteenth-century jurisprudence is presented by Jerry Bannister in "Surgeons and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland," a paper which appeared in Greg T. Smith, Allyson N. May, Simon Devereaux (eds.), Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New: Essays in Honour of J.M. Beattie (Toronto: Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, 1998), 104-134. Noting that surgeons "were a fixture of the eighteenth-century fishery" and that their education and training gave surgeons both a professional respectability and an unique training in forensic skills that the courts would find useful, Bannister explores the role of surgeons in criminal trials in Newfoundland before 1792. Bannister’s article has since been reprinted in Christopher English (ed.), Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. 9. Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2005), pp. 79-114. In “Law Reports from a Non-Colony and a Penal Colony: The Australian Manuscripts Decisions of Sir Francis Forbes as Chief Justice of Newfoundland,” Dalhousie Law Journal XIX: 2 (Fall 1996): 417-424, Bruce Kercher reports on the existence and contents of a manuscript copy of a selection of judgments by Sir Francis Forbes while he was Chief Justice of Newfoundland from 1817 to 1822 but which ended up in the State Library of New South Wales in Australia, where Forbes began serving as Chief Justice in 1823. These manuscript reports provide insight into the early legal history of Newfoundland as it developed into a British colony. Another essay co-authored by Kercher with Jodie Young, “Formal and Informal Law in Two New Lands: Land Law in Newfoundland and New South Wales under Francis Forbes,” shows how the judiciary was prepared to address the question of property law in Newfoundland within the context of local customs and practices, in considerable measure because King William’s Act of 1699 provided the necessary legislative basis to exercise some latitude – an argument also used by Andrew Rolfson (see below, next paragraph). This article appears in the collection edited by Christopher English, Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. 9. Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2005), pp. 147-191. In “Peter W. Carter vs Richard Noble: Patronage and Position in Early Nineteenth Century Newfoundland,” Newfoundland Quarterly CVIII: 1 (Summer 2015), 48-54, Christopher L. Penney examines a dispute which arose in 1819 over control of patronage appointments; Noble as Naval Officer for Newfoundland tried to replace Carter as Deputy Naval Officer at St. John’s. Did he have the authority to do this or not? Both relied on political connections in England to advance their respective positions. Clearly the shift from naval administration to civil administration was not always a smooth one, as civil and naval administrators wrestled with the complex system of jurisprudence which had evolved during the century before Newfoundland was granted full colonial status in 1824.

Another intriguing exploration into the history of the system of jurisprudence of Newfoundland and Labrador by Nina Jane Goudie offers an analysis of the way in which justice was administered in the Northern District (between Cape St. Francis and Cape Norman) early in the nineteenth century, including a breakdown of the kinds of cases that came before the bench. See “The Supreme Court on Circuit: Northern District, Newfoundland, 1826-33,” in Christopher English (ed.), Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Vol. 9. Two Islands: Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2005), pp. 115-143. Goudie also authored Down North on the Labrador Circuit: The Court of Civil Jurisdiction 1826 to 1833 (St. John’s: Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2005). As is too often the case with Labrador history, our understanding of the way legal systems evolved there has been very slow to develop. This booklet is an important step in the direction of correcting this neglect.

Many of the aforementioned developments pertaining to British policy towards Newfoundland and to the growth of a Newfoundland legal and constitutional structure can be traced through W.L. Grant & James Munro (eds.), Acts of the Privy Council of England. Colonial Series (6 vols.; London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1908-1912). Another collection of documents which is extremely useful for the seventeenth and eighteenth century is Great Britain; Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, In the Matter of the Boundary Between the Dominion of Canada and the Colony of Newfoundland in the Labrador Peninsula (12 vols.; London: W. Clowes, 1926-1927). The first Parliamentary statute concerning Newfoundland was 10 and 11 William III, cap. 25, usually identified as "King William's Act." In A History of Newfoundland and Labrador (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1980), Fred Rowe identifies this as "the constitution of Newfoundland" for more than a century." (115). This perception is reaffirmed by Patrick O'Flaherty in his very detailed discussion of the Act; see "King William's Act (1699): Some thought 300 years later" in The Newfoundland Quarterly XCIII: 2 (Winter 2000): 21-28. O'Flaherty insists that the long-term effects of the measure were "profound." Yet, as Alan Cass takes considerable pains to show, the Act of 1699 was a trade measure, not a measure to provide the fishery with some sort of system of administration; see Alan Cass, "Mr. Nisbet’s Legacy, or the Passing of King William’s Act in 1699," Newfoundland and Labrador Studies XXII: 2 (Fall 2007), 505-543. Nor was the Act of 1699 the product of a single parliamentary vision, and certainly not a coherent West Country fisheries vision. Cass shows that between its inception and its passage, the Act went through some striking modifications. To understand the Act, he concludes, you must understand what was going on in the Houses of Parliament, not what was necessarily going on in Newfoundland or the home ports of the West Country merchants.

Care must also be taken in assigning to the Act too much influence on Newfoundland's social and economic future; comparisons with the French colony of Plaisance, which experienced painfully slow growth despite determined support by the French crown, remind us that lack of more vigorous growth in Newfoundland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cannot always be blamed on government policies. Rolfson’s research essay, Land Tenure, Landowners, and Servitude on the Early-Eighteenth Century English Shore (M.A. research paper, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2004), also takes issue with traditional interpretation of the Act of 1699, arguing convincingly that the measure did not preclude property rights or settlement but instead attempted to reconcile customary practices developed within the fishery and traditions of land ownership rooted in English law and practice.

As a result, Newfoundland by the middle of the eighteenth century had begun to acquire a rudimentary administrative and judicial framework. Many of the governors of Newfoundland, from the inception of the system of naval governors with Henry Osborne (IV: 594-595) in 1729 through to the introduction of civilian administrations under Governor Thomas Cochrane (X: 178-180) in 1825, are given entries in the DCB, vols. II-X. These entries are invaluable if only because few governors have received significant scholarly attention. Yet some who are now recognized as having had great significance in the evolution of administrative measures in Newfoundland are not covered at all – George Brydges Rodney, for example, whose importance has been recognized by Jerry Bannister (see above) has no essay in the DCB. Others have been given much more attention, of whom possibly the most noteworthy is Hugh Palliser (governor from 1764 to 1768), largely because he is associated with Palliser's Act (1775), one of Parliament’s infrequent attempts to legislate administrative order in the fishery, and for his efforts to assert and extend British authority in regions recently acquired (such as Labrador) or previously ignored (such as Western Newfoundland); he is often identified as a key figure in the definition of British policy towards Newfoundland. See for example W.L. Morton, “A Note on Palliser's Act,” Canadian Historical Review XXXIV: 1(March 1953): 33-45. The most thorough treatment of Palliser is provided in several essays by William Whiteley, including "Governor Hugh Palliser and the Newfoundland and Labrador Fishery, 1764-1768," Canadian Historical Review L: 2 (June 1969): 141-63, "James Cook, Hugh Palliser, and the Newfoundland Fisheries," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXIX: 2 (October 1972): 17-22, and Whiteley's biographical essay on Palliser in the DCB, Vol. IV. See also Olaf Janzen, "Showing the Flag: Hugh Palliser in Western Newfoundland, 1764," The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord III: 3 (July 1993): 3-14 and Olaf Janzen, "The Royal Navy and the Interdiction of Aboriginal Migration to Newfoundland, 1763-1766," International Journal of Naval History VII: 2 (August 2008) [e-journal: <http://www.ijnhonline.org/volume7_number2_aug08/ article_janzen_aug08.htm>]. Both of Janzen’s essay have been reprinted in Olaf U. Janzen, War and Trade in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland (“Research in Maritime History,” No. 52; St. John’s, NL: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2013), pp. 155-171 and 173-192. One of the more tangible legacies of Palliser’s efforts to assert a British presence on the Labrador coast was York Fort, a blockhouse established in Chateau Harbour in 1766 and manned by marines from the Newfoundland station ships. Marianne Stopp examines the brief life of York Fort (its detachment was withdrawn in 1775) in a research note entitled “Chateau Bay, Labrador, and William Richardson’s 1769 Sketch of York Fort” in Newfoundland & Labrador Studies XXIX: 2 (Fall 2014): 244-271.

William Whiteley extended his work on British policy during the Palliser era in two articles on "Newfoundland, Quebec, and the Administration of the Coast of Labrador, 1774-1783," Acadiensis VI: 1 (Autumn 1976): 92-112 and "Newfoundland, Quebec and the Labrador Merchants, 1783-1809," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXXIII (December 1977): 18-26. A useful corrective to the impression that Palliser dominated the process of defining British policy is given in John E. Crowley, "Empire versus Truck: The Official Interpretation of Debt and Labour in the Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland Fishery," Canadian Historical Review LXX: 3 (September 1989): 311-336 and, more recently, Jeff A. Webb, “William Knox and the 18th-Century Newfoundland Fishery,” Acadiensis XLIV: 1 (Winter/Spring 2015): 112-122.

This process of defining policy was particularly energetic after the American Revolution, and generated a body of testimony that was recently edited and reprinted in an extremely useful collection; see Sheila Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 90, George III (Newfoundland, 1792-93) (Wilmington, Delaware: S.R. Scholarly Resources, 1975). These documents reveal the degree to which British authorities persisted in treating Newfoundland as a fishing station rather than accepting the degree to which a permanent, and increasingly diverse, resident population was rendering such thinking obsolete. That perception has long been associated with the words of William Knox in his testimony to a House of Commons committee; he described Newfoundland as “a great English ship moored near the fishing banks during the season.” Knox was an imperial official who had already played an influential role in the development of Palliser’s Act in 1775, and he continued for decades to speak as something of an”expert witness” in matters relating to Newfoundland and the fisheries. Yet as Jeff Webb points out, Knox was also heavily invested in the fishery after 1788, so that his opinions were personal ones, and not necessarily a reflection of imperial policy; see Jeff A. Webb, “William Knox and the 18th-Century Newfoundland Fishery,” Acadiensis XLIV: 1 (Winter/Spring 2015): 112-122.

The American Revolutionary, French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars eventually contributed to a substantial diversification of Newfoundland society, particularly in the largest centres such as St. John’s; see for example Sean Cadigan, “Artisans in a Merchant Town: St. John's, Newfoundland, 1775-1816,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, New Ser., No. 4 (Ottawa, 1993), pp. 95-119. Nevertheless, Cadigan suggests that Newfoundland’s commitment to a monostaple economy meant that the more successful and prosperous artisans shifted their capital into mercantile activity rather than into manufacture as was more typical elsewhere in the colonial world.

Eventually the growing complexity and permanence of Newfoundland society meant that new approaches had to be developed for to the administration of Newfoundland, ones more suited to a settled society with a burgeoning residential population rather than an economic activity, a trade. This process can be traced through essays in the DCB on such figures as Richard Hutchings (V: 443-444), Aaron Graham (V: 361-362), John Reeves (VI: 636-637), and Governor Mark Milbanke (V: 595-596). Gradually, there emerged a sentiment for administrative and political change, a sentiment that is generally, though not always accurately, defined as a "reform" sentiment. Men like William Carson and Patrick Morris were long credited with achieving representative government for Newfoundland, and both have understandably been given substantial essays in the DCB. Keith Matthews wrote an influential essay on the reformers – "The Class of '32: St. John's Reformers on the Eve of Representative Government," Acadiensis VI: 2 (Spring 1977): 80-94 - which has since been reprinted in P. Buckner and D. Frank (eds)., Acadiensis Reader: Atlantic Canada Before Confederation (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1985), I: 212-26. Matthews argued that the reformers tended to be newcomers to the island who brought the reform impulse with them from the British Isles, and that prior to their appearance, reform initiative tended to come from "above," from colonial administrators rather than from "below." Patrick O’Flaherty takes issue with this interpretation in his essay, "The Seeds of Reform: Newfoundland, 1800-18," Journal of Canadian Studies XXIII: 3 (Fall 1988): 39-59, arguing that local conditions and factors played the critical role in the emergence of the reform impulse, a view O’Flaherty reaffirms in "Government in Newfoundland before 1832: The context of reform," The Newfoundland Quarterly LXXXIV: 2 (Fall 1988): 26-30. Christopher English melds these two seemingly conflicting arguments to an extent in "The Official Mind and Popular Protest in a Revolutionary Era: The Case of Newfoundland, 1789-1819" in F. Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright (eds.), Canadian State Trials, Volume I: Law, Politics, and Security Measures, 1608-1837 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 1996), pp. 296-322. English argues that reformers in St. John’s were demanding something that, by then, the imperial context was prepared to allow. In "The Campaign for Representative Government in Newfoundland," Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, New Series, V (Calgary 1994): 19-40, Jerry Bannister also gives credit to both the emergent political culture and to colonial conditions in Newfoundland, with particular attention given to the role of the Chamber of Commerce. He argues that initial efforts by Irish Catholics to bring an end to "naval government" succeeded only when a broad-based coalition of Irish and Protestant community leaders formed in 1828 because of growing concerns over taxation; the reformers overcame resistance in London to representative government by developing support in Parliament. The press played a key role in this process. See also Bannister’s monograph, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), especially the chapter on "The Fall of Naval Government."

Key individuals on both sides of this so-called "reform" process make their appearance in several volumes of the DCB: William Carson (VII: 151-157), Francis Forbes (VII: 301-304), Patrick Morris (VII: 626-634), Newman Wright Hoyles (VII: 420-421), Thomas Brooking (IX: 84-86). Concerning Francis Forbes, additional insight is also available through Bruce Kercher's previously mentioned essay on "The Australian Manuscripts Decisions of Sir Francis Forbes..." in the Dalhousie Law Journal XIX: 2 (Fall 1996): 417-24. The DCB should also be consulted for essays on individuals like James Lundrigan (VI: 409-411) and John Leigh (VI: 392-393), who figured in the particular events that seemed to underscore the need for reform, and on the governors whose reports and activities contributed to Great Britain's decision to abandon the fiction that Newfoundland was little more than an over-sized fishing station: see Gambier (VI: 270-271), Gower (V: 359-361), Duckworth (V: 273-276), Keats (VI: 371-373), Pickmore (V: 671-2), Hamilton (VII: 376-377, and Cochrane (X: 178-180).

Both the courts and the press played critical roles in the development of political institutions, yet neither had been particularly well served until recently when it comes to analyses of those roles. Reference has already been made to two articles by Christopher English on the development of a Newfoundland legal system before 1832 ("The Development of the Newfoundland Legal System to 1815" and "From Fishery Schooner to Colony: The Legal Development of Newfoundland, 1791-1832"), but there was not very much work done to carry the analysis forward into the period of representative government. The sketchy essay on the "Judiciary" in the ENL III: 143-149 was too superficial to fill the need. This has begun to change, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of the Law Society of Newfoundland & Labrador. The Society’s series of publications organized by the “SS Daisy Legal History Committee" has commissioned and released a number of volumes with essays on Newfoundland legal history. Thus, The Face of Justice on Newfoundland’s Northeast Coast (St. John's, NL: Law Society of Newfoundland, 2012), edited by Christopher Curran and Melvin Baker, include two articles on the eighteenth century: in “‘I shall show it to the governor’: Law and Authority in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland,” Jerry Bannister (drawing on research compiled for his larger works) focuses here on the activities of merchant and justice Benjamin Lester in eighteenth-century Trinity; in “Two Competing Authorities in Eighteenth-Century Conception Bay: The Complaint of Conception Bay Merchants against Reverend Laurence Coughlan,” Hans Rollmann explores the conflict in Harbour Grace between local religious and secular authorities. Other essays in that volume venture into the nineteenth century: Christopher Curran contributes an essay on “The Judicature Act of 1824 and Its Antecedents,” Christopher Curran and Linda White focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greenspond in “The Law at Greenspond,” while Robert Cuff and Gerald Penney look at “Harbour Grace Court House, 1830-1834” and Jim Miller does the same for “The Trinity Court House.” The Law Society also published Nina Jane Goudie, Down North on the Labrador Circuit: The Court of Civil Jurisdiction 1826 to 1833 (St. John’s: Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, 2005) and, most recently, A Ferryland Merchant-Magistrate: The Journal and Cases of Robert Carter, Esq., J.P., 1832-1840, Vol. I, edited by edited by Christopher Curran (St. John’s: The SS Daisy Publication series; St. John’s: Law Society of Newfoundland & Labrador, 2013) and A Ferryland Merchant-Magistrate: The Journal and Cases of Robert Carter, Esq., J.P., 1841-1852, Vol. II (St. John’s: The SS Daisy Publication series; St. John’s: Law Society of Newfoundland & Labrador, 2014), also edited by Christopher Curran. Finally, for a broader contemporary perception of Newfoundland, not only in terms of its administrative and political condition but also its economic and social conditions, students are encouraged to read the report prepared by the judges of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and presented in 1831 to Governor Cochrane; see “The Judicature Act of 1824 Revisited” by Christopher P. Curran and Melvin Baker in Newfoundland & Labrador Studies XXX: 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 265-307.

Similarly, until recently, little work has been done on the nature and role of the press in the political and intellectual life of early nineteenth-century Newfoundland. Biographical essays about men who either reported the news or figured prominently in news stories appear in the DCB, including John Ryan (VII: 763-766), Henry Winton (VIII: 947-951), George Lilly (VII: 507-508), Robert Parsons (XI: 673-674), and Chief Justice Henry John Boulton (IX: 69-72). Then there is "The Road to Saddle Hill," an article by Patrick O'Flaherty in The Newfoundland Quarterly LXXXIX: 3 (Spring/Summer 1995): 21-26, which looks a little at the nature of early nineteenth-century newspapers as much as it looks at Henry Winton, and also Jerry Bannister's previously mentioned article on "The Campaign for Representative Government in Newfoundland," which credits the local press with transforming concerns over proposed new taxes into "a cogent argument for representative government." An article on "Journalism" appears in the ENL III: 125-135 but it is more descriptive than it is analytical. The most thorough treatment of the history of the press and journalism have been two dissertations, both by Maudie Whelan: Journalism in Newfoundland: A Beginning History (MJ thesis, Carleton University, 1993); and The Newspaper Press in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland: Politics, Religion, and Personal Journalism (PhD thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2002). Neither, however, has been published, and it can only be hoped that this will soon change.

Return to "Reader's Guide" Home Page
Proceed to "Beothuk and Mi'kmac"
or continue on to "Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland"

http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/nfld_history/nfld_history_colonization.htm

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The History of the Newfoundland Mi'kmaq

In what is now Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, a part of the Gaspé Peninsula and eastern New Brunswick, the Aboriginal people who greeted the first European visitors to their coasts were the Mi'kmaq (Micmac). Human occupation of this region extends back to more than 10,000 years ago, during which time its Native inhabitants adjusted to dramatic climatic change, significant technological development, and the arrival of new groups from the south. None of these things, however, would have as great an effect upon Aboriginal people as the coming of strangers from Europe. In the century after John Cabot's 1497 voyage to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Mi'kmaq would trade furs for copper kettles, woolen blankets, iron knives, and the other products of early modern Europe, as well as shallops (small sailing vessels) to carry the new goods to other Native peoples throughout the Gulf and as far south as New England. During this period, if not earlier, the Mi'kmaq reached the island of Newfoundland.
Scattered references in English and French historical records suggest that during the 17th century (1600-1700), Mi'kmaq families hunted, fished, and trapped from Newfoundland's southwest coast to Placentia Bay. Travelling back and forth between Cape Breton and Newfoundland, these Mi'kmaq incorporated the island of Newfoundland into what one researcher has aptly called a "domain of islands" (Martijn 1989).

Relations with the French, English, and the Beothuk

The question of the nature of Mi'kmaq relations with the French, with the English, and with the Beothuks is a contentious one. The French, who long fished off Newfoundland's coasts, were sporadically at war with the English from the end of the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century, and it has been argued that French authorities brought the Mi'kmaq over from Cape Breton as allies in the war with England. This is clearly not the case. The Mi'kmaq who came to Newfoundland did so of their own accord, and only after their arrival on the island did the French ask for their assistance. Not surprisingly, Mi'kmaqs had fought for years against English settlers in New England.
It has also been alleged that the French paid a bounty to the Mi'kmaq to collect Beothuk heads. This charge also does not hold up under close examination. French records reveal no indication of such a bounty; rather, it is probable that as the Mi'kmaq presence on the island increased, the Beothuks, as they did with European settlers, avoided the Mi'kmaq. (In this regard it should also be noted that Mi'kmaq oral tradition includes examples of friendly relations with the Beothuks, including the belief that the Mi'kmaq provided a haven for refugee Beothuks.)

Newfoundland Occupancy

The question of the nature of Mi'kmaq occupancy of Newfoundland during the 17th and early 18th centuries is another controversial question. Mi'kmaq oral tradition holds that the Mi'kmaq have continuously occupied the island since prehistoric times and that this original population was later joined by a group from Cape Breton. Other authorities argue that Mi'kmaq occupation of the island was not permanent until the 1760s (Bartels and Janzen 1990). These authors contend that, while Mi'kmaq from Cape Breton hunted, fished and trapped in Newfoundland on a seasonal basis from a very early date, during the 1760s, the "insensitivity and indifference" of the British, combined with their "resistance to Mi'kmaq demands that a Roman Catholic priest be appointed to serve their spiritual needs" were the most powerful factors influencing a group of Cape Breton Mi'kmaq, led by Chief Jeannot Pequidalouet, to take up permanent residence in Newfoundland (ibid., 86). Martijn (1989), however, cautions that we are imposing our own ideas of how and where people lived centuries ago when we employ terms such as the "Cape Breton Mi'kmaq" or "Newfoundland Mi'kmaq" for early historic Native people. Rather, Martijn argues, the period was a time when a group of Mi'kmaq sometimes lived and hunted in what we now call Cape Breton and sometimes that same group exploited the resources of what we now call Newfoundland. Both islands, in other words, were part of the group's traditional territory. Indeed, given the movement back and forth between these two islands until the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps this is the best way to think of the ancestors of today's Newfoundland Mi'kmaq.
For Mi'kmaq everywhere, however, the defeat of the French by the British, and the loss, in 1763, of all French territory in North America (except for the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off Newfoundland's south coast) were traumatic experiences. When there were two imperial powers fighting for control of the continent, the Mi'kmaq were valued--and subsidized--as military allies of the French. With the loss of those subsidies and the decline of the fur trade in the northeast, the Mi'kmaq of the Atlantic region faced a grim future. That was particularly true in the Maritime provinces where British settlers occupied the lands and waters which had once been Mi'kmaq. For those Mi'kmaq living in Newfoundland, however, the late 18th century and much of the 19th century was a kind of "Indian summer", a period when the Newfoundland Mi'kmaq were able to hunt, fish, and trap in the interior of Newfoundland--a region then relatively unknown by Newfoundlanders of European ancestry.

Mi'kmaq Camp, Sydney, N.S., 1857

Mi'kmaq families were still travelling back and forth between Cape Breton and Newfoundland in the middle of the 19th century.

Micmac camp. Sydney, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia photographed by Paul-Émile Miot in 1857. Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada/coll 1995-084/PA-194632.

With the demise of the Beothuks in the early 19th century, Mi'kmaq trappers and hunters expanded their range from the southern region of the island to include much of the interior of the main portion of the island. Mi'kmaq camps were to be found in St. George's Bay and the Codroy River in the southwest, White Bear Bay and Bay d'Espoir on the island's south coast, and Bonavista Bay, Gander Bay, and the Bay of Exploits in the northeast. In 1857, Newfoundland census takers recorded Mi'kmaq families in St. George's Bay, Codroy River, Grandy's Brook (on the south coast), Conne River, Bay d'Espoir, and in the Bay of Exploits.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a British naval officer indicated a Mi'kmaq village of about 100 people in Bay St. George, and by the 1830s, Newfoundland missionaries were referring to a Mi'kmaq village in Conne River of about the same size. It is possible that the number of Mi'kmaq living in Newfoundland at any one time in the 19th century was about 150 to 200 people, but population figures for Native people in this era must be regarded with caution. It is not at all clear that European observers took into account the fact that families moved seasonally between home villages, hunting territories, fish camps, and traplines. Census-takers, too, were not always reliable, nor is it likely that they could always win the trust of Native informants.
Newfoundland Mi'kmaqs ranged throughout the interior of the island, trapping beaver, otter, fox, lynx and muskrat which they exchanged for guns, knives, flour, tobacco, and other things which they could not make. Although families laid claim to specific trapping territories, hunting for meat, especially caribou (an essential part of Mi'kmaq diet), was open to all.

Guides, Explorers, and Sportsmen

Although the major portion of the Mi'kmaq food supply consisted of the fish and game of the country, and the bulk of the people's income came from trapping, other activities were also important. For example, the Mi'kmaq's intimate knowledge of the interior meant that they were in great demand as guides for explorers and sportsmen. William Cormack's 1822 expedition across Newfoundland to search for the remnants of the Beothuks has been lauded as the first traverse of the island by a white man, but it could not have been done without his guide, a Mi'kmaq named Sylvester Joe. Significantly, the two encountered Indians in the interior several times during their journey. After Cormack, missionaries such as Edward Wix, geologists such as J.B. Jukes, Alexander Murray and James P. Howley, and sportsmen and naturalists like the noted J.G. Millais, all relied upon Mi'kmaq guides.

Joe Jeddore, a Mi'kmaq Guide

From J. G. Millais, Newfoundland and its Untrodden Ways (London: Longmans, Green, 1907) facing 202.

Mi'kmaq knowledge of the country served them in other ways, as well. In the 1850s the colonial government hired Mi'kmaq guides to survey a route for a telegraph line which was to run the length of the island from St. John's to Port aux Basques. After the line was completed in 1856, Mi'kmaqs were retained as repairmen. Because Newfoundland's ice-bound northern coasts prevented delivery of the mail in winter, the government decided in the 1860s to hire Mi'kmaq men to deliver the mail overland through a network of trails reaching the northern communities. In the 19th century the interior of the island was essentially a Mi'kmaq preserve and nothing illustrates this better than the decision by governments, geologists and sportsmen to rely on Mi'kmaqs to lead them through unfamiliar territory.

Threats to Mi'kmaq Life

That situation, however, would change with a growing population of European descent and with greater intrusion by this larger society into the interior. Perhaps the greatest threat to the Mi'kmaq way of life was the completion of a railway across the island in 1898. Now, for the first time, it was possible for large numbers of settlers and sportsmen to have quick access to the huge interior caribou herds. By all accounts the slaughter was appalling. Population figures for the caribou stocks can only be approximations, but it is estimated that the herds fell from 200,000-300,000 in 1900 to near extinction by 1930. The effect on the Mi'kmaq was catastrophic. Caribou meat had always been a mainstay of the Mi'kmaq diet, and with the decline of the herds it became much more difficult for families to live in the interior and to follow traplines. As a result, the 20th century brought new challenges and new hardships for the island's Native people.
By the beginning of this century, the woods and barrens of the interior were becoming more crowded. Where once only Mi'kmaq had travelled, now there were settlers hunting, trapping, and fishing for salmon, and sportsmen and market hunters taking an increasing toll of the declining caribou herds. In 1905, the Newfoundland government gave the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Corporation a huge amount of land in the interior and a site on the Exploits River (Grand Falls) where the company built a large, modern mill. Logging crews not only cut over the country, they also accelerated the destruction of the caribou by killing them for meat.

Reuben Lewis, a Mi'kmaq Leader in the Early 20th Century, with Souliann and Ben Stride

From J. G. Millais, Newfoundland and its Untrodden Ways (London: Longmans, Green, 1907) facing 213.

Mi'kmaq culture as well as their economy came under attack in the first half of the 20th century. The Mi'kmaq had been Roman Catholics since the end of the 17th century and Newfoundland's Mi'kmaq had maintained their ties with the church through visits to French priests in St. Pierre, off Newfoundland's south coast, and to Cape Breton, especially for the July 26th feast of St. Anne. It is probable that as long as contacts between the church and the Mi'kmaq were brief and seasonal, the impact upon day-to-day life would not be traumatic. Things would change, however, with the arrival in the early 20th century of a priest at St. Alban's, near Conne River. His attempts to eradicate "pagan" beliefs and practises, his high-handed dismissal of a Conne River leader, and his attempts to ban the use of Mi'kmaq created a resentment that persists in the community today.
Perhaps even more destructive to the Mi'kmaq way of life, however, was the decline of the world market for furs. A downward spiral of fur prices began in the 1920s and accelerated in the world depression of the 1930s. Although some Mi'kmaq were able to find work as loggers in the 1930s, the period was one of real hardship for most. World War II, however, brought a measure of improvement for some Mi'kmaq, as it did for many other Newfoundlanders. Some men joined the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit as loggers, while others took jobs with the Bowater's pulpwood operations working in the Conne River area.

Reclaiming First Nations Rights

Nonetheless, in the 1950s and 1960s the living standard of Conne River appears to have fallen below that of their neighbours. While no one actually starved, in 1958, as one authority noted, "only 30 per cent [of Conne River's people] were functionally literate" (Jackson 1993:168). Newfoundland's Mi'kmaq received no federal benefits during this period because, when Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, the Mi'kmaq were not recognized as "status" Indians. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Newfoundland Mi'kmaq were a part of a general movement by Aboriginal peoples throughout North America to reclaim their rights as First Nations. This might have been expected since the Newfoundland Mi'kmaq were experiencing some of the same difficulties encountered by Native people elsewhere. For example, older Mi'kmaq today from the west coast recount how their neighbours stigmatized them as "Jackatars", and how some people hid their Native ancestry for fear of ridicule. In Conne River, the flooding resulting from the massive Bay d'Espoir hydroelectric project and the construction of new roads to the south coast further depleted the caribou hunting and fur trapping of the region. Partly in response to these factors, the people of Conne River elected a chief and band council in 1972; a year later Mi'kmaq from the entire province came together in an organization called The Federation of Newfoundland Indians, the purpose of which was to achieve recognition by the Federal government. In the 1970s, the Innu and Inuit split from the Federation to form their own organizations. While the Conne River community achieved federal status under the Indian Act in 1984, the quest for federal recognition for Mi'kmaq outside Conne River continues.
Version française

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DeGarthe William E. deGarthe carved faces and forms of fishermen, their wives and families, a guardian angel and Peggy of the Cove at Peggys Cove. I have a lithograph of his - very old... did u know that a part of Halifax ...especially Yacht Club area painted their houses in his favourite painting colours... brilliant Canadian artist- FISHERS

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NOVEMBER 30, 2015

China and Asia's favourtie lobster- from Nova Scotia Tourism folks... Nova Scotia Tourism ‏@VisitNovaScotia 1m1 minute ago

Happy Dumping Day - the day when all of our brave lobster fishermen on the Southwest Shore go out to sea. #staysafe pic.twitter.com/TmZe97XFvi

Salmon Fishers

Fishing -spiking fish

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ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES- and Making a Northern Ocean Arc: the Significance of Sailors and Seafaring to Western Canadian History

BLOGSPOT:

CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Nova Scotia's Lobster baby.... China's favourite....some old style music, songs, news and folklore.... come visit... GETCHA NOVA SCOTIA ON... GETCHA CANADA ON...them fishing grounds of Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada- wanna go fishing? come on down

http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2015/08/canada-military-news-nova-scotias.html

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QUOTE: He paused a moment and then added, "Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don't seem to mind."

what a story - The Old Fisherman

http://www.atimetolaugh.org/the-old-fisherman.html

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STAN ROGERS - THE QUEEN OF THE GRAND BANKS SCHOONERS- BLUENOSE -2007

Bluenose

Generations of Atlantic Canadians have grown up with stories of Captain Angus Walters and Bluenose. The vessel became the world's most famous Nova Scotian fishing schooner and won a place in the hearts of thousands.
Bluenose was launched at the Smith and Rhuland Shipyard, in Lunenburg, on March 26, 1921. Hundreds of people watched as the vessel went down the ways. The crowd cheered and the hills echoed with jubilant good wishes for the new schooner.
Captain Angus Walters, a Lunenburg-native, was 39 years old when Bluenose was launched. He was eager to prove the worth of the new schooner. Work progressed rapidly to get Bluenose ready for the first trip to the fishing banks.
On April 15, 1921, Bluenose left for the Banks. Captain Walters was pleased with the way the vessel handled. They put in a full fishing season - first, the frozen baiting trip, then the spring trip and, lastly, the summer trip. Bluenose was home by September. By fishing a complete season, Bluenose had fulfilled the main requirement as a prospective competitor in the International Series. The racing schooners had to be "real" fishing vessels - and had to have fished a full season, to qualify for the Series. The organizers of the International Fishermen's Series were determined that the Series would not be taken over by "yachting-types".
In October, Bluenose went to Halifax, with other Nova Scotian schooners, to take part in the elimination races. The Nova Scotian competitors were : Canadia, Delawana, Alcala, Uda R. Corkum, Donald J. Cook, J. Duffy, Independence and Bluenose. Bluenose won the eliminations and became the Canadian entrant in the International Fishermen's Series.
The following week, Bluenose raced against the American schooner Elsie. On October 24, 1921, Bluenose defeated Elsie in the final race of the Series and won the International Cup. Bluenose was never defeated in an International Fishermen's Series.
Bluenose continued to fish and race, with good success. In 1922, Bluenose went to Gloucester and raced against the Henry Ford. Bluenose won the Series. The following year, in Halifax, Bluenose raced against the Columbia. Angus Walters later remarked that the Columbia was the greatest rival of the Bluenose. The 1923 Series did not reach a satisfactory conclusion. There were disagreements between the Captains of both vessels and the Race Committee. Bluenose went home to Lunenburg and the Columbia went home to Gloucester. The International Races did not resume until 1931.
The intervening years were difficult for everyone involved in the fishing industry. Fishermen worked hard, but fish prices were low. There were disastrous storms at Sable Island, known as the August Gales of 1926 and 1927. In those two storms, six Lunenburg schooners were lost with all hands. The American schooner Columbia was also lost, in the Gale of 1927.
In 1929, the Canadian Postal Service issued a beautiful 50-cent Bluenose stamp.
The International Fishermen's Series was revived in 1931. Bluenose raced against the new Gertrude L. Thebaud. To the delight of Nova Scotians, Bluenose won the Series.
As the effects of the Great Depression began to be felt, Bluenose began a new career as a touring vessel, visiting far-off ports. Bluenose went to the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. The following year, Bluenose visited Toronto. In 1935, Bluenose went to England, for the Silver Jubilee of King George V. Thousands of people were welcomed aboard the Bluenose - and the international fame of the schooner was established. Engines were installed in the Bluenose in 1936, to enable the vessel to go fresh fishing.
In 1937, the Canadian dime was changed to include an image of Bluenose. Bluenose had truly become a national symbol.
The last International Fishermen's Series took place in October of 1938. The 17-year-old Bluenose raced against the 8-year-old Gertrude L. Thebaud, near Gloucester and Boston.
The 1938 Series was comprised of five individual races. At the start of the fifth and deciding race, both schooners were tied two wins each. Angus Walters and his crew sailed the Bluenose to one final victory. Bluenose crossed the finish line first - and an age in history was brought to a glorious conclusion. Captain Angus Walters became the sole owner of the Bluenose and desperately tried to save the schooner. However, by 1942 the cost of maintaining the schooner was more than Captain Walters could afford. He sold the Bluenose to the West Indies Trading Company. Bluenose began a career of freighting goods in the Caribbean. In January, 1946, Bluenose went aground on a reef, near Haiti.
Many schooners met a similar fate. Gertrude L. Thebaud was lost in 1948, in southern waters, working as a freighter. Bluenose memory, however, continued. When the replica of Bounty was built at Smith and Rhuland in 1960, Lunenburgers spoke of a Bluenose replica. The Halifax-based firm of Oland and Son Limited agreed to finance the construction of Bluenose II. In 1963, Bluenose II was launched from the same shipyard, built by many of the men who had worked on the original vessel.

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History of Fisheries in the Northwest Atlantic:

The 500-Year Perspective

W. H. Lear

Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 200 Kent Street

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0E6

Days of plenty: a catch of cod and haddock on the Grand Bank, 1949

http://journal.nafo.int/J23/lear.pdf

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NOVA SCOTIA- History of the Fisheries Museum

The Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic had its beginning in the mid-1960's, as the Centennial Project of the Town of Lunenburg. Originally called the Lunenburg Fisheries Museum, the goal of the volunteers who supervised the project was the formation of a museum which would recognize the historic importance of the fishing industry of the Canadian east coast.
In 1966, the last salt-bank schooner to fish from the port of Lunenburg, Theresa E. Connor, was purchased by the Lunenburg Marine Museum Society. The inspiration for this purchase came from Canada's Centennial Commissioner, John Fisher. He suggested that the preservation of a fishing schooner would be a fitting tribute to the many generations of fishermen who had sailed from Canadian ports.
Several schooners were available at that point in time. The Lunenburg Marine Museum Society entered into discussions with the owners of these schooners, but quickly realized the historic significance of the Theresa E. Connor. In addition to being one of only a few remaining schooners, the appearance of the Theresa E. Connor had not been altered. The vessel was the same as the day it was launched, in 1938. The owners, Zwicker and Company Limited, offered the schooner to the Society at a reduced price of $30,000 and the Theresa E. Connor became the flagship of the Museum. Exhibits were installed in the hold of the vessel, and thousands of visitors were welcomed aboard in the first summer of operation, in 1967.
The Museum developed rapidly. Many volunteer hours were spent by men who had made their living in the fishing industry. Captain Angus Tanner was one of the earliest supporters of the Lunenburg Fisheries Museum. He devoted himself to the collection of artifacts pertaining to the fishing industry.
Many family treasurers found their way to the Museum through his efforts. Sea chests, navigational instruments, charts and other old-time items were gathered and brought in to the Theresa E. Connor. Exhibits were developed based on these donations, arranged by individuals who had first-hand experience in the fishing industry.
By 1975 the Lunenburg Fisheries Museum had found a permanent home at the site of W. C. Smith and Company, a predecessor of National Sea Products Limited. The property had most recently housed the old Lunenburg Sea Products plant. Two other vessels had joined the Theresa E. Connor. They were the Cape North, one of the first wooden side trawlers to successfully fish from the port of Lunenburg, and the rum runner Reo II. Visitor attendance was nearing 50,000 people per season, and plans were well underway for expansion into the adjacent buildings of the old fish plant.
It was during this time period that the Lunenburg Marine Museum Society entered into discussions with the Nova Scotia Museum. The Provincial Museum recognized the importance of the fishing industry in the history of Nova Scotia, and agreed to add the Lunenburg Fisheries Museum to the Nova Scotia Museum system of branch museums. Mr. Ainsley Fralick, Chairman of the Board of the Lunenburg Marine Museum Society, was instrumental in establishing contact with the National Museum of Canada Corporation. As a result, by 1977 the Museum had become part of the Specialized Museums Programme of National Museums of Canada. The name of the Museum was changed to the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic. The Museum received its official mandate from the Federal Government, to focus on the history of the fishing industry for the entire eastern coast of Canada.
Expansion quickly followed with the addition of Federal and Provincial funds. The old fish plant wharves were in need of major repairs. In 1978-79 the wharves were re-built. With this construction, visitors were able to gain safe access to the buildings, which were also under development.
Parks Canada, a federal agency, expressed interest in arranging a permanent exhibit for the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, detailing the age of sail on the Grand Banks fishing grounds. Several years were spent researching the topic, and the final exhibit covers the years from the late 1400's to the 1930's. Detailed models of representative fishing vessels and informative panels were installed. Several works of art were also commissioned for this exhibit, to help in the interpretive study of the Grand Banks fishery. These include silk-screened banners, and a life-sized wooden model of a 211 pound cod, the largest recorded cod ever caught.

The Museum Today

Since the early 1980's, many exhibit and research programmes have been implemented at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic. More than 25 exhibits and displays are currently open to the public, including a large video and film theatre. Exhibits include an extensive aquarium, with fish that are important to the fishing industry; the famous schooner Bluenose; the tragic August Gales of 1926 and 1927; Rum Runners; Life in Fishing Communities; Shipbuilding; Marine engines; Whaling and Whales; and the Hall of Inshore Fisheries, with inshore fishing boats.
The Museum fleet has changed during the years. The schooner Theresa E. Connor is still the flagship of the Museum, having undergone an extensive restoration project, amounting to a sum of more than $750,000. In 1988, for a period of seven months, the Theresa E. Connor was located at the Scotia Trawler Shipyard, in Lunenburg, undergoing carefully supervised restorative work. As is always the case with wooden vessels, maintenance and restoration projects will continue.
The Theresa E. Connor is now partnered with the side trawler Cape Sable. This steel side trawler became part of the Museum in 1984. Built in 1962, Cape Sable fished for National Sea Products Limited until the early 1980's.
The exhibits at the Museum are only one part of the public programs. School groups are encouraged to participate in special projects which high-light aspects of the inshore and off-shore fishing industry. Current school programmes focus on dories, lobsters, life aboard a fishing schooner and the Bluenose. Each program can be adapted to suit various grade levels, and lasts approximately one hour.
The Documentation Centre at the Fisheries Museum includes a photographic collection of several thousand items, archives, a non-lending library, and microfilmed records. All of these research materials are available to students and researchers.
The Education Centre is used by school groups for Museum programs, and by many organizations for meetings and training seminars.

https://fisheriesmuseum.novascotia.ca/educational-resources/history-fisheries-museum

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HANK SNOW-- SQUID JIGGING GROUND

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Commercial Fishers: Atlantic Cod

Two centuries before the arrival of the Pilgrims, explorers reported an abundance of enormous cod in the waters of present-day New England and Atlantic Canada. English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold was so impressed that he changed the name of Cape Saint James to Cape Cod in 1602.

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Salt cod was an essential element in the web of early Atlantic commerce, but cod were not harvested on an industrial scale until the mid-1800s. As waves of immigrants reached America, the nation’s cities, industries, and population all grew. Commercial fisheries grew with them.

The Banks

Vast underwater banks stretch along the edge of the continental shelf from southern New England to Newfoundland, Canada. They provide the right combination of water temperature, currents, and food-rich shallows and ledges for Atlantic cod and other species to thrive. Two areas were especially important to commercial fishermen: George’s Bank, located about 100 miles east of Cape Cod, and the Grand Banks, 1,000 miles beyond.

Get Your Fish!

In 1876, Gloucester businesses were all about selling fish and outfitting fishermen.

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From The Fisheries of Gloucester from 1623 to 1876 . . . (1876)

Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Gloucester: Fishing on the Banks

The New England cod fishery grew explosively in the mid-1800s. Men of Italian, Canadian, West Indian, and especially Portuguese descent flocked to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to find work in the fisheries and escape the discrimination they encountered in other New England communities. By 1888, approximately 200 Portuguese families lived in Gloucester, making it the largest Portuguese community on the East Coast.
By the late 1880s, nearly 400 vessels fished out of Gloucester.

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Our Lady of Good Voyage

Portuguese families in Gloucester have worshiped at Our Lady of Good Voyage Church since 1893. The statue on the second level shows the church’s namesake holding a boat in her left hand, symbolizing a safe voyage.

Courtesy of the Cape Ann Historical Association

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Work at the Wharf

Gloucester fishermen unload, cull, weigh, and cart away Grand Bank cod at the wharf of Parmenter, Rice & Co., in Gloucester, 1882.

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Drying Fish

At the height of the cod fishery in Gloucester, the waterfront was filled with fish drying racks like these at D.C. & H. Babson, in 1882.

A Terrible Mortality

Gloucester’s dependence on the North Atlantic meant a close acquaintance with tragedy and death. “The history of the Gloucester fisheries has been written in tears,” wrote an anonymous reporter in 1876.
Between 1866 and 1890, more than 380 schooners and 2,450 Gloucester men never returned from the fishing grounds. In a single storm on August 24, 1873, nine Gloucester vessels and 128 fishermen were lost. In 1865, community members formed the Gloucester Fisherman’s and Seaman’s Widows and Orphan’s Aid Society Fund to help fishermen’s families.

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Widows’ Home

This house was built for fishermen’s widows in Gloucester around 1870. It had ten apartments of three rooms each. Rent for each apartment was $3 per month.

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“When will the slaughter cease?”

In 1882, Capt. Joseph Collins asked this question in Gloucester’s newspaper, the Cape Ann Weekly Advertiser. Too many fishermen perished at sea, and Collins and others lobbied for new schooner designs featuring deeper, more stable hulls and sail plans that didn’t require a long bowsprit, the spar that projected forward from the bow.

Whitman Emulsion of Cod Liver Oil with Hypophosphites

It’s Good for You

View Object RecordCod liver oil was a byproduct of the cod fishery. The oil contains essential vitamins and helped prevent rickets, a common disease among malnourished children in the late 1800s. Children dreaded the taste of their daily dose, and this sample from the early 1900s recommends three doses a day.

Gift of Mario Casinelli

Gloucester Schooners

Schooners were built around Gloucester, Massachusetts, beginning about 1713. These vessels had large holds for fish and supplies, but they were also designed for speed to reach fishing grounds quickly. With fishing so profitable, owners demanded ever larger and faster vessels.
They got what they wanted—longer, wider hulls to carry more fish and immense amounts of sail to catch more wind. But safety was sacrificed for speed. Many schooners were dangerously top-heavy and prone to capsizing in storms. They were also hazardous for the men who clambered out on the long bowsprit to tend the sails. Schooner bowsprits came to be known as “widow makers.”

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Drawing by H. W. Elliott and Capt. J. W. Collins, about 1882

The George’s Bank Cod Fishery

Fishermen using hand-lines stood at the rail of the schooner, each fishing a single line that had a spreader and two hooks. One fishermen is using a gaff to bring in a fish, one is cutting out the cod’s tongue—the method used to keep track of how many fish were caught by each fisherman—and the third is tending his line. George’s Bank fishermen used about 900 feet of line. Hauling in a pair of cod by hand took about thirty minutes.

Half Model, Fishing Schooner Helen B. Thomas

Fishing schooner Helen B. Thomas

Built by Oxner & Story shipbuilders, Essex, Massachusetts, 1902

Gift of Thomas F. McManus

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McManus Knockabouts

View Object RecordThomas A. McManus, a Boston-born son of Irish immigrants, designed a safer fishing schooner. The hull of his vessel was short and deep, with a rockered keel for stability. McManus made this half model and displayed it for a year in his Boston shop before Capt. William Thomas of Portland, Maine, decided to have a full-sized vessel built to the lines. The Helen B. Thomas was launched in 1902 and was the first of many schooners called “knockabouts” that were built without bowsprits.

Cod Hand-line

Hand-line

View Object RecordThis hand-line—a reel with fishing line, a sinker, and hooks—was the type used in the 1880s.

Gift of the U.S. Fish Commission

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The Bank Trawl-Line Cod Fishery

In the 1850s fishermen started working from small boats called dories, using long lines baited with many hooks. Fishermen caught significantly more cod working from dories that were carried aboard schooners to the fishing grounds.

Drawing by H. W. Elliott and Capt. J. W. Collins, about 1882

Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Ship Model, Fishing Schooner Dauntless

Fishing schooner Dauntless

Built in Essex, Massachusetts, 1855

Lost at sea, 1870, with 12 men aboard

Transfer from U.S. Fish Commission

The Dauntless

View Object RecordThe fishing schooner Dauntless is shown equipped for dory trawling, with nests of dories stacked amidships. At the fishing grounds, the dories were lowered with two men in each, and the dory mates set their trawl line, which typically had 1,200 to 1,600 baited hooks. To haul in the catch, they had to steer the dory, lift the line into the boat, and remove the fish. The dory mates returned to the schooner to off-load the fish.

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Hook

Imagine having to bait and fish 1,600 of these on a single fishing line. That was one of the jobs of a dory fisherman, day in and day out, for months at a time.

Gift of Peter Nelson, from the schooner Grace L. Fears

Bait Knife

Gift of G. P. Foster

Fish Knife

View Object RecordGloucester fishermen typically baited their trawl lines with small fish such as menhaden or capelin. They used knives like this to prepare slivers of bait.

Ship Model, Schooner Fredonia

Schooner Fredonia

Built by Moses Adams, Essex, Massachusetts, 1889

Transfer from U.S. Fish Commission

The Schooner Fredonia

View Object RecordThe Fredonia’s deep hull, narrow beam, and fine lines represent the pinnacle of design for deepwater fishing schooners. It influenced the design of many other fishing vessels. In December 1896, while fishing on the Grand Banks, the Fredonia was hit by a heavy sea and sank. Two of its 23-man crew perished; the rest were rescued by a passing steamer.

Mackerel Plow (Knife)

Gift of the U.S. Fish Commission

Fish Plow with Pewter Inlays

View Object RecordThis type of knife, also called a plow, was used to cut the flesh of a fish along the backbone to give it a thicker, fatter appearance that appealed to customers. It was used in the iced fish trade.

Fisherman’s Oilskin Hat

Gift of A. J. Tower

Oilskin Hat

View Object RecordGrand Banks fishermen toiled in all kinds of weather. To protect themselves from the icy winds and spray, they wore felt-lined rubber boots and jackets and hats made of oiled canvas. This flannel-lined oilskin hat was new when it was displayed in an exhibit of fishermen’s clothing in London in 1883.

Fishermen’s Woolen Nippers

Gift of the U.S. Fish Commission

Nippers

View Object RecordThe fishermen’s nippers were knit of woolen yarn and stuffed with woolen cloth. Fishermen were able to grasp and hold a fishing line better if they wore woolen nippers on their hands.

Cook’s Clothing

In the summer, cooks aboard Gloucester fishing schooners wore cotton trousers and plaid shirts like these. In the era of dory fishing, the cook was one of the most important men on board. He prepared four or five meals a day, fished if needed, and assisted the captain when the men were out in the dories.

Man's Shirt, 1878-88

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Man's Trousers, 1878-88

View Object Record

Gift of the U.S. Fish Commission

Schooner Cook's Bell

Cook’s Bell

View Object RecordThis bell was used aboard a Gloucester schooner to summon fishermen to their meals. Daily meals started with breakfast before dawn, dinner as the main meal, and a hearty supper. Frequent “mug-ups,” or coffee breaks, usually consisted of coffee or tea and leftover snacks. On larger schooners, the cook served meals in two shifts.

Gift of the U.S. Fish Commission

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Feeding the Crew

Cook George W. Scott kept a journal on the fishing schooner Ocean King during a voyage out of Gloucester to the Grand Banks in 1879. Among the provisions brought aboard for a four-month voyage were:

210 Hogsheads of salt (for salting the cod)
5 Barrels beef
1 Barrel pork
1 Barrel hams
10 Barrels flour
330 Pounds of sugar
50 Gallons molasses
15 Bushels potatoes
200 pounds butter
and including all other things usuly [sic] found in a grocery store

Fox and Geese Game Board

Gift of Capt. George Merchant Jr.

Fox & Geese Board, 1880s

View Object RecordFishermen passed the time on long voyages playing Fox & Geese and other simple board games. This game requires two players. The fox (a single token) has to remove the geese (multiple tokens) before they surround him.

Foghorn

Gift of Wilcox, Crittenden & Co.

Foghorn, 1880s

View Object RecordGetting lost in the fog was a dory man’s nightmare. Dories were equipped with foghorns that the dory mates used to signal their location. In foggy weather, men aboard the schooner would sound a more powerful fog horn operated with a pump or bellows to let the dory men know the vessel’s location.

What Happened to Cod?

After the peak catches of the 1880s, Gloucester fishermen continued to work coastal and offshore waters. In the 20th century, they typically used diesel- and gasoline-powered vessels called trawlers that pulled large nets to catch cod, haddock, flounder, and other fish.
Foreign trawlers began to appear in the 1950s, and a decade later huge factory trawlers from nations around the globe were capturing tons of fish. In 1977, the United States and Canada banned foreign trawlers from the fishing grounds. With foreign competition gone, the American and Canadian fleets soon expanded and the stocks of cod declined further. In the 1990s, both nations agreed to close much of George’s Bank to fishing for bottom-dwelling species like cod. Today, most cod at supermarkets was not caught in the North Atlantic.

Carved Cod-in-a-Coffin

Cod Coffin

View Object RecordIn 1992, Canada declared a moratorium on cod fishing in its Atlantic coastal waters. Fisherman Dan Murphy of Dunville, Newfoundland, made this cod-in-a-coffin to express his view of the decision and its impact on his livelihood. He sold these coffins at a local flea market.

Continue to Chesapeake Oysters

http://americanhistory.si.edu/onthewater/exhibition/3_4.html

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L’Encyclopédie de l’histoire du Québec / The Quebec History Encyclopedia

History of the Canadian Fisheries

[This text was written in the 1930's and was published in 1948; for the precise citation, see the end of the document.]

Fisheries. Canada's fisheries are extensive and important. The Atlantic coast line from Grand Manan to Labrador is 5,000 miles in length, while the total area of coastal waters, including the bay of Fundy and the gulf of St. Lawrence, is not less than 200,000 square miles. The Pacific coast of Canada measures 7,180 miles in length and is exceptionally well sheltered. When it is remembered that the fishing grounds of the ocean are practically limited to the comparatively shallow inshore waters over the continental shelf, it is realized how large a proportion of the fishing grounds of the north Atlantic and north Pacific Canada possesses. In the matter of freshwater areas Canada stands unequalled in the number and size of the lakes within her borders. She possesses more than half of, the fresh water of the globe.

In the quality of her fisheries Canada also stands preëminent, since due to her northern situation the dominant fish are the salmon, trout, whitefish, cod; halibut, herring, bass and their relatives, which include the finest of the world's food and game fishes. The annual production of the commercial fisheries fluctuates around $50,000,000. In order of importance, the chief commercial fish are the various species of Pacific and Atlantic salmon, cod, halibut, herring, haddock, whitefish, pilchards, sardines, trout, yellow pickerel, smelts and . mackerel. The principal game species are the various bout; salmon and char, bass, maskinonge, pike and yellow pickerel.

Research aimed at the improvement of the fisheries is carried out by the Biological Board of Canada, which operates under the minister of fisheries. These researches are concerned not only with the conservation and improvement of the fisheries, but also with freezing, canning, and curing, and with their utilization in the manufacture of fish meal, oil, glue and other products. These studies are carried out at four stations, two on the Atlantic coast, at St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and two on the Pacific, at Nanaimo and Prince Rupert, British Columbia. Some freshwater fisheries research is carried out by. the Biological Board, but the most outstanding studies in this field are carried out by the Fisheries Research Laboratory of the Department of Biology, University of Toronto. For further information the publications of these organizations should be consulted. There is no definitive work on the fishes of Canada or of any of the provinces. The federal government in 1913 published a check list of the fishes of the Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland by A. Halkett.

History of the fisheries.

It was Cabot's voyage of exploration in 1497 that first brought Europeans in touch with the abundant marine life of the Atlantic coast of North America. The coastal plain north-east of New York, which had been submerged to a depth of 1,200 feet, provided in its uplands the series of banks extending from New England to the Grand Bank of Newfoundland and the resistant geological areas of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the mainland. The prolific character of the cod, and its range from Labrador to New England, supported a rapid expansion of the fishing industry from Europe, particularly to meet the demands of Catholic countries with restricted agricultural development and limited supplies of protein foods and of shipping, including the navy, with its demands in long voyages for such compact foodstuffs as dried fish. In the sixteenth century, ships from the widely scattered ports of France prosecuted the fishery over an extended coast line in North America, and probably developed the bank fishery about 1550. The Portuguese, with closer concentration of ports, were concerned more directly with the favourable concentrated fishing area in Newfoundland along the southeast coast. The Spanish fishery began in the last decade of the first half of the century, but succumbed in the face of aggressive English activity, culminating in the Armada and the effect of high costs of production, which followed continued imports of treasure from the New World. Expansion of the English fishery implied cheap supplies of solar salt obtained in tropical areas and the opening of markets. Profitable markets in Spain and Portugal hastened development of the English dried fishery from the concentrated ports of the coast line of the west country to the favourable area of Newfoundland, and in turn to a weakening of the position of the Portuguese and extension of the scattered French fishery to more remote small areas for the prosecution of the dried fishery, as at Canso and Gaspé. Penetration of Europeans to the more distant coast lines, following importation of treasure and the rise in prices, led to a more pronounced development of the French fishery in Canadian waters and of the English fishery in New England after the turn of the century.

A monopoly granted to the Marquis de la Roche on the mainland, with an establishment at Sable island, broke down in the fishing industry, but survived with financial support from interests in the channel ports concerned with the green and dry fisheries and the furtrade in the St. Lawrence gulf and river. The continental character of France and the large number of ports and markets ranging from the channel to Marseilles in the Mediterranean involved reliance on domestic consumption and emphasis on the green fishery, produced largely on the banks. The French fishery extended from the Canadian Labrador to Gaspé, Cape Breton, and the Nova Scotia coast. Advantages in the bank fishery's dependence on domestic consumption, scattered character of sites suited to the dry fishery, attempts to enforce company control, and difficulties of settlement as a result of limitations on agriculture weakened the French fishery and contributed to the withdrawal from Nova Scotia in 1713. New England fishermen, with the advantages of settlement and the development of shipping, lumbering, and agriculture were in a position to send small vessels to the banks off the coast of Nova Scotia to take fish, which were dried on the Nova Scotia shore even in the French régime, and after the treaty of Utrecht developed an important trade at Canso. French attempts to develop an extensive dry fishery in Cape Breton with Louisbourg as a centre failed because of the necessity of dependence on the agricultural development of the basins of the bay of Fundy and on the English colonies for adequate supplies of foodstuffs. The capture of Louisbourg, chiefly by the aggressiveness of New England from 1745 to 1748, weakened the French in foreign markets for dry fish, and the establishment of Halifax in 1749, the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755, and the Seven Years' War led to the downfall of the French régime in the Atlantic maritimes.

Retreat of the French was followed by migration of pre-Loyalists from New England to Nova Scotia, by penetration of New England fishermen to the gulf of St. Lawrence, and by participation in the fishery of Gaspé and Cape Breton of fishermen from the Channel islands of Guernsey and Jersey. The outbreak of the American revolution involved serious disturbance to the fishery and the treaty of Versailles introduced restrictions on the New England fishery. Attempts of British policy to substitute Nova Scotia as a base of supplies of fish and other products to the West Indies for New England were destined to failure, but the fishery continued to expand in Nova Scotia and the gulf of St. Lawrence until disturbed by the outbreak of the War of 1812. The convention of 1818 rigidly narrowed the rights of New England fishermen in the waters of British North America to "the purpose of shelter and of repairing damages, of purchasing wood, and obtaining water, and for no other purpose whatsoever", and established the basis for later negotiations.

The demands for the narrow terms of the convention and for rigid interpretation of its clauses were supported by trading interests, particularly in Halifax, anxious to check smuggling as an inevitable part of the fishery carried on by New England vessels in inshore waters. Enforcement of the regulations in the seizure of vessels within the threemile limit led to numerous conflicts between officials of Nova Scotia and the United States, particularly with the use of purse-seines in the development of the mackerel fishery. These difficulties disappeared with the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 to 1866, by which American schooners were permitted again to fish in Canadian waters. Abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty and imposition of licences brought renewed conflict, which was again eliminated with the Treaty of Washington from 1873 to 1885. The treaty provided `for an arbitration to estimate the advantages obtained by American fishermen in Canadian waters in contrast with those obtained by Canadians in American waters. The arbitration gave the Halifax award of $4,500,000 to Canada, a sum which was invested to support bounties to the extent of $150,000 to the fishery beginning in 1882. With the end of the treaty, modus vivendi licences were issued to American fishermen, allowing them to fish in Canadian waters on payment of annual fees. In 1918 these were superseded by a reciprocal arrangement between Canada and the United States, which lasted until 1921 in so far as the United States was concerned, and to 1923 so far as Canada was concerned. In 1924 modus vivendi privileges were discontinued, but were revived in a modified form in 1933. Exclusion of American vessels from Canadian waters became more effective with increasing efficiency in enforcement of the treaty, with the spread of settlement particularly along the Labrador shore, and with the results of the North Atlantic fisheries arbitration, which ruled that American vessels were not allowed to fish within three miles of a line drawn from headland to headland of bays less than ten miles wide.

Restrictions on American vessels were accompanied by attempts to encourage the Canadian fishery. Bounties were paid throughout the nineteenth century at various intervals and with varying degrees of success. Jurisdiction of the fisheries, partly because of the international character of the industry and of its close relationship with problems of the tariff and smuggling, was given to the Dominion in the British North America Act in 1867. A department of marine and fisheries was established, and in 1884 a department of fisheries. This department was merged with that of the marine in 1892; but in 1927 a fisheries branch was re-established, and in 1930 provision was made for the appointment of a minister of fisheries. Administration has tended to become decentralized, as it was transferred to Ontario in the nineties and to Quebec in 1922. A decision of the Privy Council in 1898, permitting both provinces and Dominion to impose licence duties, was followed by the creation of a provincial department in British Columbia in 1901. A decision in 1928 ( Somerville case) limited rights of the Dominion to fishing operations only, or until the fish were landed.

The character of administration has changed, partly as a result of changes in the technique of the fishery and in the increasing importance of the fresh fish industry, with its reliance on a number of varieties. The West Indies continued as an important market for the dried fish of the Canadian Atlantic after 1818, but abolition of slavery in 1833 had serious effects on the industry. Competition from fish taken by the French with support of a heavy bounty and development of the trawl line fishery on the banks in the forties added further difficulties. The Reciprocity Treaty and the Civil War brought improvement. The fisheries began to spread from Gaspé across the gulf to the Labrador shore, and settlement weakened the position of Nova Scotia schooners accustomed to carrying on the fishery in that region. Consequently Lunenburg vessels began to adopt the technique of trawl-line fishing and to carry on the fishery on the Grand Banks. The first vessel went to the banks in 1873. Production of dried cod increased in Nova Scotia to a peak of 791,044 cwt. in a five-year average from 1884 to 1888. After the peak in 1886, decline followed the increasing importance of the steamship and the disappearance of the wooden sailing-vessels with its .disastrous results to numerous ports, weakening of the market as a result of competition from beet sugar with cane sugar, increase in tariffs, competition from meat products and development of fresh fish industries. Demand for ships during the war and competition from Norway, with the introduction of motor-boats, and from Iceland with the steam trawler in the post-war period, which forced Newfoundland out of the European markets into the Brazil and West Indies market, had serious effects on the position of Lunenburg with its production of heavy salted fish specially suited for the Porto Rico market. Production of dried fish in Nova Scotia declined to 123,885 cwt. in 1931. The number of Lunenburg vessels declined from 149 in 1920 to 26 in 1933.

Increase in urban population, development of the railway and fast transportation, and development of refrigeration led to a rapid expansion of the fresh-fish industry, with emphasis on haddock and halibut to offset the decline of the dried-fish industry, with its emphasis on cod. Mechanization was extended in the increasing use of the trawler, especially after 1911, in the development of refrigeration express service from the Atlantic coast to Montreal and the interior (with government support from 1909 to 1919), and with a shift in demand from frozen to fresh fish. The tendency of the trawler fishery to concentrate on Halifax has been accompanied by protests from out ports and by increasing restrictions on the number of trawlers. The gasoline engine and proximity to the Banks have strengthened the position of points along the Atlantic shore. The number of nations concerned and the highly competitive character of the industry, as prosecuted on the Banks, has made general conservation measures extremely difficult.

The inshore fishery has been particularly dependent on the fresh-fish industry, and has become highly specialized in relation to the geographic background. The herring fishery has developed along the shores of Charlotte county, New Brunswick, and the smelt fishery along the Northumberland shore. Fish that spawn in the rivers have been subject to rapid exploitation, and production has declined. Depletion of the shad fishery is an illustration of the effects of rapid exploitation. Conservation measures have been worked out in great detail in the lobster fishery and the oyster fishery. The salmon fishery is controlled by leases in Quebec and New Brunswick and by licences in Nova Scotia. Expansion of this fishery has been directly dependent on improvement in transportation to the interior, particularly from New Brunswick rivers and from Gaspé and the Canadian Labrador. The high-quality dried cod produced by established firms of Channel Island origin, especially at Percé and Paspebiac, has continued to hold the Naples and Brazil markets, although these firms have tended to withdraw from the north shore as a result of competition, following improved steamship navigation.

Mechanization, with its demands for refrigeration facilities, trawlers, and plant for the utilization of by-products, has involved demands for large-scale capital organization. Fluctuations in prices as a result of changes in technique, in economic conditions, and in markets, have contributed to serious difficulties for the fishermen and to demands for governmental assistance and for extension of co-operation, particularly through the efforts of the St. Francis Xavier University. In 1930 subsidized fast vessels improved the position of fishermen in eastern Nova Scotia. Improved methods of grading, of handling; and of marketing the product have been the object of extensive interest on the part of the governments concerned.

The problem of conservation with more limited supplies and greater ease of exploitation was more acute in the interior: The fisheries of the lakes and rivers of continental Canada, particularly the lakes extending along the edge of the Precambrian formation from the Great lakes to Bear lake and in the Precambrian formation, were exploited by the Indians, and in turn by Europeans in support of extension of the fur-trade and later of settlement. The fishery of the St. Lawrence provided an important supply of food for settlement. Salmon in lake Ontario were rapidly exhausted with increase in population: White fish on the upper lakes, particularly at Sault Ste. Marie, and in smaller lakes in northern Ontario and northern Manitoba, were exploited during the period of the fur-trade, and later of settlement, and decline in production followed. Railways extending to the north contributed to depletion and to problems of conservation. Sturgeon rapidly disappeared. Supplies of whitefish in James bay, of Arctic trout along the coast of the Arctic regions, and of the inconnu in the Mackenzie, support fur-trading posts through providing food -for men and (more important) for dogs.

On the Pacific coast drainage-basin, salmon occupied an important place in the support of trading posts established near the headwaters of the rivers and lames near the mouths of the important rivers and along the coasts. Indian culture was profoundly influenced by the Pacific salmon, and the fur-trade expanded in areas suited to the capture of large quantities of fish. The Hudson's Bay Company began to export salted salmon to the Hawaiian islands after the establishment of Fort Langley on the Eraser river in 1827. After the decline of the gold rush, many persons attempted to develop various industries in British Columbia, and became engaged in the salmon fishery. The first canning of salmon was apparently carried out by Captain Edward Stamp at Alberni in 1860, but it was not until the technique of production had been elaborated and markets provided that the industry was in a position to expand. Drift nets were introduced about 1864, and canning was added to the salt fishery in the seventies. Individuals such as Hapgood in the United States and Ewen and Loggie in Canada, with experience acquired in the lobster-canning industry of the Atlantic coast, made important contributions. Completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway widened the market for the finished product, and provided larger quantities of lower-cost raw materials; but problems of capital forced large numbers of plants into bankruptcy prior to 1890. A rapid increase from 29 in 1890 to 72 in 1901 brought further difficulties and led to the formation of the British Columbia Packers Association in 1902, which acquired 41 canneries and closed 19.

Mechanization became increasingly important with the turn of the century. The gill net was improved with the substitution of hand-laid sturgeon twine for linen twine, as a result of the suggestion of G. Robertson, a fisherman from Labrador, about 1900, and with the introduction of gasoline engines. Large power-boats and purse-seines were followed by rapid increase in production and by more efficient technique in manufacture. The iron chink invented by E. A. Smith in 1901 was introduced into British Columbia plants in 1906, each machine displacing possi bly 20 men. Disappearance of double cooking after 1898, introduction of the rotary cutter, and improvements in the manufacture and handling of cans, facilitated expansion of the industry. Traps were prohibited in the regulations of 1889, but a limited number were permitted off Vancouver island in 1904. In 1892 licences were restricted to British subjects, and fishermen coming from the Columbia or the Fraser river were excluded.

The sockeye, as the highest quality and most uniform size of fish, spawns in the tributaries of lakes in the interior; the fry remain in fresh water at least a year and go out to sea to return in the fourth or fifth year to the same stream to spawn and to die. Cohoes , pinks, chums, and spring salmon spawn in running streams. In 1902, 85 per cent. of the catch was made up of sockeye, but with the outbreak of the Japanese-Russian war the lower-quality species of pinks and chums increased in importance. The problem of conservation became acute following a slide on the Fraser river as a result of construction work on the Canadian Northern Railway and the inability of large numbers of salmon to reach the spawning ground in 1913, a year of the "big run" (the year after leap year). The war and post-war period increased the demand for lower-quality varieties, and by 1933 the percentage of sockeye declined to 20.4 per cent., whereas chums had increased to 23 per cent. and pinks to 42 per cent. Attempts of the Dominion to control canneries, by requiring licences in an Act passed in 1908, were declared ultra vires. The province introduced legislation in 1910 limiting the number of boats in each area. In 1930 the provincial government granted five-year leases to canneries and compelled enforcement of conditions of operation The problem of restricting American fishermen in taking fish going to the Fraser river has proved insuperable, and treaties have been invariably defeated by the Senate In 1935. however, traps were forbidden in American waters leading to the Fraser. Competition from the salmon fishery of Siberia and Japan since the war has increased the burden of conservation on Canadian industry, and as a partial relief Canadians were allowed to use purse-seines in 1932. Scientific research has been actively prosecuted in the interests of conservation and hatcheries have , been established on an important scale.

Pressure toward the formation of large organizations of canneries has been persistent, and the tendency toward amalgamation has been pronounced. Peak-load costs incidental to short seasons, long-run fluctuations, and attempts to reduce the number of Orientals engaged in the industry (Japanese in fishing and Chinese in canning) and to improve labour conditions, have tended to raise costs. The independent fishermen in the vicinity of the Fraser river and the gulf of Georgia have been able to dispose of their product more advantageously than the majority in other regions, who are forced to rely on the canneries for advances of credit and equipment. In addition to utilization by canning, salmon are sold as fresh or frozen (cohoe and spring), or as mild cured and kippered (spring), or as dry salted (chum) for the Japanese market.

Refrigeration has been more important in the development of other types of fishery, notably halibut. Two chief zones, banks from cape Scott to cape Spencer, and banks between Middleton island and Shumagin islands off the Alaskan coast, have been exploited following completion of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway to Prince Rupert in 1913, the building of cold-storage plants along the Pacific coast, and the use of the Diesel engine, especially after 1923. Depletion of the banks led to the creation of an International Fisheries Commission under the Halibut Treaty of 1923 between Canada and the United States, and to the introduction of conservation measures.

In 1917 large numbers of pilchards were discovered off Vancouver island, and a canning industry emerged. But it was not until an order-in-council of March, 1924, permitted use of pilchards for reduction purposes that the industry began to expand to its present size. In 1928-33 reduction plants were in operation, producing 3,997,656 gallons of oil and 14,502 tons of meal. In 1930 over three million dollars were invested in the industry, and 700 fishermen were employed. A herring fishery has been developed to an important scale in Barkley sound.

The significance of the fishery in the recent economic development of Canada has been enhanced with development of the tourist trade. Road construction to less accessible areas has been responsible for rapid depletion, for increasing attention to problems of conservation, and for the introduction of extensive regulations on the part of departments concerned with fisheries.

In contrast with the fur-trade and its emphasis on continental development and centralization, the fishing industry was essentially a maritime development with emphasis on decentralization. Fish were taken over a wide area by relatively small units of capital equipment (the fishing vessel) through the efforts of individuals employed on a profit-sharing basis. It was essentially an industry based on relatively inexhaustible supplies and European labour in contrast with a trade based on exhausting supplies and an Indian population. Whereas the fur-trade tended toward monopoly and centralization, the fishing industry stressed individual initiative and decentralization. Monopolies flourished in the fur-trade on the continent and persistently disappeared in the fishery in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New England. The fishery and the individualism which it fostered stressed development of trade and shipping, and served as a spearhead to break the control of European monopoly in North America. New England influence flourished in Nova Scotia and with its contributions to the solution of the problem of responsible government checked the tendency of the second Empire to follow the path of the first. The influence of the Maritimes in the development of continental Canada following Confederation was evident in the insistence on lower tariffs of finance ministers chosen as a guarantee of protection for the Maritimes. The movement toward independent status gained momentum under a Maritime prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, and in relation to extraterritorial matters primarily concerned with the fishery, as in the Halibut Treaty, the first to be signed between Canada and another Power without the intervention of Great Britain. The increasing .importance of machine industry in the fishery has been, evident in a tendency toward centralization, particularly in British Columbia ; but the tradition of freedom in the industry survives in the Atlantic Maritimes, as the effective protests of fishermen and the development of cooperation attest.

See O, W. Freeman, Salmon fishery of the Pacific coast (Economic geography, April, 1935), J. Q. Adams, The Pacific coast halibut fishery (Economic geography, July, 1935), R. F. Grant, The Canadian Atlantic fishery (Toronto, 1934), G.G. Strong, The salmon canning industry in British, Columbia, (University of British Columbia, 1934), Report of the Royal Commission investigating, the fisheries of the Maritime provinces and the Magdalen islands (Ottawa, 1928), C. E Cayley, The North Atlantic fisheries in United States-Canadian relations (Doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, 1931), Annual reports of the departments of the provinces and of the Dominion concerned with fisheries; Report on the marketing of Canadian fish and fish products (Cockfield, Brown and Company), Canadian Fisherman, Pacific Fisherman, W. S. Fox, The literature of salmo solar in lake Ontario and tributary streams (Trans. Roy. Soc. Can. , 130), N. Denys, The description and natural history of the coasts of North America ( Acadia ) (Toronto, 1908), Sea-fisheries of eastern Canada, (Ottawa, 1912), Commission of Conservation reports.

Source : H. A. INNIS, "Fisheries", in W. Stewart WALLACE, ed. The Encyclopedia of Canada, Vol. II, Toronto, University Associates of Canada, 1948, 411p., pp. 341-348.

http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.belanger/QuebecHistory/encyclopedia/FisheriesinCanada-HistoryoftheCanadianfisheries.htm

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Making a Northern Ocean Arc: the Significance of Sailors and Seafaring to Western Canadian History

Syllabus: History 2400, History of Atlantic Canada since 1500

MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY OF NEWFOUNDLAND DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Winter Semester, 2007

https://hallnjean.wordpress.com/sailors-worlds/syllabus-history-2400-history-of-atlantic-canada-since-1500/

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CANADIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA

History of Commercial Fisheries

Fisheries drew the first Europeans to what is now Canada, and still sustain large coastal and inland regions.

Fisheries drew the first Europeans to what is now Canada, and still sustain large coastal and inland regions. The industry is defined by cycles of “boom and bust”, with fishermen enjoying periods of plentiful harvest and financial gain, only to suffer through periods of hardship and unemployment. Despite these ups and downs, Canadian fisheries and the lifestyle associated with them are intrinsic to certain regional identities, in particular those of British Columbia and Atlantic Canada.

Beginnings: 1500-1763

Europeans, including the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Basques, began fishing off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in the 16th century. The plentiful, easy-to-catch cod was the most valuable commodity: dried or salted, it could be transported long distances and would keep for several months. Fishermen arrived from Europe in the spring and stayed until early fall. They fished directly from the boats using hooks and lines. Some Europeans, particularly the Basques, also fished for whales, which soon became scarce. By the late 16th century, the English and French were in competition with each other. The fishery encouraged the growth of their empires, because fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and trading economically reinforced one another. While the economic goal was the same for both, the English and the French had different methods of fishing and organizing the industry.

English Fisheries

At first, the English fishery was concentrated in semi-permanent fishing stations in protected harbours on Newfoundland's southeast coast. The captain of the first ship to arrive at a harbour became the fishing admiral and governed the station. Fish were caught close to shore from small boats brought from England. The day's catch was unloaded directly onto a "stage" (wharf), where the fish were cleaned, split, and lightly salted. They were then dried on "flakes" (open tables that allowed maximum circulation of air). This shore-based dry fishery produced a "hard-cure" cod suitable for trade to distant markets, and it became the basis for England's territorial claims to Newfoundland.

In the 17th century, British fishing vessels began to bring passengers who fished from small boats in Newfoundland (see Bye-boat) and would either return to Britain or choose to settle in the new territory. Some British vessels took aboard fish cured by Newfoundland settlers, also known as planters. Over time, instead of carrying fishermen from Britain to Newfoundland, some ships only brought trade goods, returning to Britain with salt fish. The space required for flakes, combined with the natural distribution of fish would, over time, foster a string of settlements all along the Atlantic coast.

Meanwhile, New England fishermen had increased their fishing in Nova Scotia and the Bay of Fundy. The British presence in these areas increased after about 1750, and spread elsewhere after 1763. Although salmon and other species drew increasing attention in Atlantic areas, cod still dominated. By the late 1700s, the walrus fishery in the Gulf of St Lawrence had practically disappeared under continued pressure from New England vessels.

French Fisheries

French fishermen from widely scattered ports fished not only along the shore but also, more commonly than the English, on the Grand Banks and other banks. They had access to more salt than the English, and most French fishermen processed the catch aboard their ships. This green fishery yielded a shorter-lived product more suited to home use than distant travel, but it allowed the French to get the fish to markets faster than the English, and to return to the banks more than once in a season. After the English dislodged the French from the Avalon Peninsula, Placentia, NL, served as French headquarters until 1713, when, by the Treaty of Utrecht, France gave up its territorial claims to Newfoundland and mainland Nova Scotia. The French fishery then became more dispersed, with fishermen making more use of Cape Breton and other areas. Cape Breton was lost through the fall of New France and the Treaty of Paris in 1763, but French fishermen were still allowed to use Newfoundland's west and part of its northeast coast (see French Shore).

Innovation and Conflict: 1763-1867

New methods

Parallel with the small-boat fishery, a great schooner fleet developed in the northwest Atlantic, with the initial impetus coming from New England. Schooners (fore-and-aft rigged vessels such as the Bluenose) ranged the coast in search of cod, halibut, haddock, and mackerel. In the mid-1800s, schooners broadened their scope by carrying dories — small fishing boats — to launch fishermen at sea. They further boosted fishing power using longlines. A French innovation, longlines were anchored near the sea floor and had shorter lines and hooks attached to them, multiplying the number of hooks in the water. Fishermen would set out in their dories and bring fish back for splitting and salting on board the schooners.

In addition to longlines, another new fishing method affected the trade primarily for herring and mackerel. For centuries, fishermen had used beach seines, or nets, requiring points of land to help encircle fish. The new purse seine, developed by New England fishermen, operated in open water by surrounding surface-schooling fish with a net hanging down from a line of corks. The fishermen tightened a purse line at the bottom of the net to enclose the fish in what looked like a floating bowl.

Large fleets of schooners, particularly New England ones, fished the offshore banks and the Gulf of St Lawrence. New England, Maritime, and Québec vessels joined with a growing fleet of Newfoundland schooners fishing the Newfoundland and Labrador coast. In Labrador, "Liveyers" ("livers here") were permanent residents, "floaters" moved along the coast, and "stationers" set up fishing stations where they could cure fish ashore. Beginning in the 1700s, Conception Bay schooners, followed by others, also developed a large seal fishery, which became important in Newfoundland's growth.

Revolution and War

The American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars increased British dependence on British North American fish and lumber. The mutually reinforcing fishing industry, lumber industry, and trade market brought vigour to the Atlantic economy. Even today the period is considered a golden age, although most fishermen were probably poor. The majority of them operated small shore boats rather than schooners, and many, especially in the southern areas, alternated between the fishing and shipping trades. Southwestern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick's Bay of Fundy led British North America’s fishery. The region had a good lumber and trading base, lots of fish, a good mix of species, a long ice-free fishing season, proximity to American and West Indian markets, and nearby alternative employment in the US. In the era of the American Revolution, subsequent conflicts, and the War of 1812, there were arguments over the fishery between New England and British North American fisherman. These were only partly resolved by the Convention of 1818, under which New England fishermen could generally enter British North American waters within three miles from shore only for shelter, repair, and to purchase wood and water. They could, however, fish within three miles of the Îles de la Madeleine, along the southwestern and western shores of Newfoundland, and along the coast of Labrador east of about Natashquan. New England fisherman could also dry fish in the unsettled areas of Labrador and Newfoundland's southwest coast. Between 1854 and 1866 a reciprocity treaty with the US allowed fishermen from each jurisdiction to fish within the other's territorial waters and provided some measure of free trade for the general economy. The treaty aided the British North American economy, meaning that the end of the treaty coincided with some economic distress among coastal fishermen.

Confederation to First World War: 1867-1918

At Canada's Confederation in 1867, the federal government was given authority over the fisheries, and set up the Department of Marine and Fisheries. Following the end of the reciprocity agreement, Canadian authorities confiscated several American vessels. The conflict was addressed in the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which restored free fishing and free trade for fisheries only and, in other provisions, solidified Canada's status as an independent nation. In 1885, the United States revoked the fishery provisions of the treaty. Canada again boosted its patrol fleet, and the relationship between the two sides was at times adversarial until a preliminary agreement allowed limited American access to Canadian ports for fuel and other purposes, although not for fishing within three miles. On the Pacific, conflicts between Americans and Canadians sealing on the Bering Sea were settled by an international tribunal in 1893 and a subsequent international agreement (see Bering Sea Dispute). In Newfoundland, where foreign fishing vessels bought bait from local fishermen, colonial authorities enacted the Bait Acts in an attempt to control the trade. Through its stubborn and partly successful efforts to govern foreign fishing, Newfoundland won more respect from the United States and Canada, and more independence from Great Britain, (see Bond-Blaine Treaty).

Pre-Confederation legislation in the Province of Canada included a system of restrictive licensing partly designed to protect private ownership of salmon-fishing stands. Reflected in the Fisheries Act of 1868, this power offered the potential to balance fishing efforts with resource abundance. But in the late 19th century, decisions by Britain's Judicial Committee of the Privy Council weakened federal authority in freshwater fisheries relative to provincial authority. One consequence was a relaxation in the award procedures for freshwater fishing licences. In the sea fisheries, federal authorities generally ignored licensing and let people fish freely, except in the BC salmon fishery.

The fisheries service sought conservation through other means. Various royal commissions provided the rationale for regulatory action, usually resulting in restrictions of fishing times and seasons, fish size, and fishing gear (for example, the purse seine was banned for many years from the Atlantic fishery). The Fisheries Act also outlawed putting substances that would be harmful to fish into the water. The licensing, pollution, and other powers of this strong act remain the pillars of Canadian fishery management.

In the half century following Confederation, the fisheries service developed an extensive hatchery program (see Aquaculture). Although fishery authorities claimed excellent results, by the mid-1930s the program's success was minimal and most hatcheries were closed, especially in BC. A number of them remained on the East Coast, largely to stock rivers for sport fisheries. In 1898 the federal government established the first of several biological and technical research stations under the Biological Board of Canada (later the Fisheries Research Board).

Immediately after Confederation, Maritime leaders tried to take advantage of new continental opportunities in railways and manufacturing, and made little effort to promote the self-reinforcing lumbering-fishing-exporting marine economy. As related industries declined, by the First World War only fishing remained a major employer. More than a thousand scattered communities depended on the fishery and often found it difficult to make a decent living. Meanwhile, the growing urban, industrial, and continental economy was changing coastal ways. Steel vessels with greater reliability, safety, and size began to displace wooden trading vessels. In Newfoundland's seal fishery, steamers started to replace sail ships in the 1860s, leading to unemployment. Improved canning technology created the Bay of Fundy sardine industry, and a huge expansion of the lobster industry, with hundreds of small plants. By the First World War, trawlers — powerful motor vessels towing large conical nets along the bottom — were becoming significant in the groundfish fishery (groundfish are literally those fish that dwell near the ocean floor, such as cod). Federal authorities made these trawlers fish at least twelve nautical miles offshore.

Elsewhere in Canada, Ontario fisheries in the 19th century had fresh-fish markets nearby and depended less on salting and canning. Persistent fishing trends in the Great Lakes led to the depletion of desirable species, which allowed less valuable ones to take over. As well, environmental changes resulting from increased population caused the disappearance of Atlantic salmon from Lake Ontario. In the Prairies, the early lake fishery was dominated by companies that rented small boats to fishermen, who were often Aboriginal. A strong winter fishery, in which nets were set below the ice, developed as well.

On the Pacific coast, salted and dried fish were used by Aboriginal people,, fur traders, and miners. From about 1870 on, entrepreneurs built many salmon canneries. Canning technology and settlement patterns gave the BC industry a more concentrated character than that of the Atlantic. Even in isolated places, the industry depended on bringing together many plant workers and many boats to take advantage of the seasonal migrations of Pacific salmon. Railways provided transport to larger markets for salmon and for the halibut fishery, which in its early years used schooners and then steamers. The First World War interrupted fish supplies to Europe, bringing a huge boom to Canada's fishery. As prices and incomes rose, diesel engines became common on larger vessels in the 1920s. The federal government abandoned the national system, established before the war, of transport subsidies for fish. It seemed the fishery could do well on its own.

Boom and Depression: 1919-39

In the post-war Maritimes, salted groundfish still led the industry but the fresh-fish trade became more important than before. Scallops and swordfish had joined the herring, lobster, and other fisheries. The Great Depression started early in the Atlantic fisheries, sped by technological and trade factors. While Newfoundland and Gulf of St Lawrence fisheries were served largely by old fishing craft from Nova Scotia, European fleets used more reliable trawlers. In the 1920s, after losing some of its market to European suppliers, Newfoundland competed more strongly in the West Indian markets traditionally supplied by the Maritimes. This caused a price decline that forced many fishermen into other fisheries, only to see the price drop again in a ricochet effect. Meanwhile, American enterprises developed the filleting and quick-freezing processes, enabling them to sell packaged fresh or frozen fillets, instead of whole fish, to a wider market.

Increasing economic difficulties brought about a 1927 royal commission, whose findings had two main effects: first, the trawler fleet was reduced to only three or four vessels during the 1930s. This restriction, combined with decreased markets and investment capital, extended an existing technological lag and delayed development for many years. Although the Lunenburg fleet in particular was doing more winter fishing for the fresh-fish market, the trawler "ban" slowed the growth of the fresh, fresh-frozen, and year-round fisheries.

Second, the commission prompted the federal government to help set up fishermen's co-operatives (see Co-Operative Movement), leading to the creation of the United Maritimes Fishermen's Co-operative and the Québec United Fishermen. Meanwhile, in Newfoundland a remarkable fishermen's movement began before the First World War, when William Coaker built the Fishermen's Protective Union (FPU) into a powerful industrial and political force. Coaker's attempts to reform fishery marketing failed, and the FPU faded away during the 1930s. Newfoundland exporters remained weak and prone to destructive over competition.

During the Depression, hardship was common in the Maritimes and Québec, and worse in Newfoundland. The "oldest colony," as it was often called, faced financial collapse in the early 1930s, and lost self-rule in 1934. British authorities appointed a Commission of Government, which ran affairs until after the Second World War, and took some steps to regulate the export trade. In the fisheries in the Prairie provinces , overfishing, overcrowding, lack of organization, and weak marketing created an unstable, low-income fishery. Governments tried various schemes of amelioration, including lake and boat quotas and fleet limitations, but without thorough and effective application.

In British Columbia after the First World War, the demand of veterans for employment ended "limited entry" (licence limitation) in the salmon fishery, at least for white people. Restrictions remained for some time on Aboriginal people and Japanese-Canadians; meanwhile, white fisherman gained clear dominance in the fishery. With gillnetting still strong, the purse-seine and troll fisheries grew. The salmon industry, with more than 70 plants at the beginning of the century, began to consolidate in the late 1920s (as it did again in the 1950s and the late 1970s). The 1923 Halibut Treaty between Canada and the US was Canada's first independently signed treaty. Under its auspices, the International Pacific Halibut Commission, a pioneering venture in international management, regulated and improved the Pacific halibut fishery, partly through conservation quotas.

The pilchard (California sardine) fishery developed in the late 1920s and suited the purse seine and "reduction" fishery, which reduced fish flesh and bones into fertilizer or fish meal. It boomed in the 1930s but failed in the 1940s when the resource declined. Pacific coast fishermen continued to organize more than Atlantic fishermen, and their organizations had long-lasting influence. One, the Prince Rupert Fishermen's Co-operative Association, took hold in the 1930s and became one of the world's most successful fishermen co-operatives, dominating the northern BC fishery for several decades.

Though continuing to regulate extensively for conservation, federal fisheries management showed little vigour or innovation between the wars. In 1922 the federal government allowed Québec to manage its own fixed-gear fisheries, or that part of the industry using stationary equipment such as traps and longlines anchored to the bottom of the ocean. In 1928, following a court decision, it yielded control of processing plants to the provinces. In 1930 it allowed the Prairie provinces to manage their own fisheries and separated the Department of Fisheries from the Department of Marine.

Later in the 1930s, the fisheries department set up a Salt Fish Board to regulate and subsidize exporters, a move overtaken by the events of the Second World War. The war hiked prices and incomes, and the board vanished into the general wartime system of controls. The fisheries department ended the purse-seine ban in the 1930s, and began to remove restrictions on trawlers, as the war sparked a new emphasis on productivity and development.

The Age of Development: 1945-68

During and after the Second World War, fishing fleets adopted new technology including radios, radars, sonar, nylon nets, and hydraulically powered gear. Increasingly powerful vessels could track down and catch more fish, and transport them over longer distances. Governments encouraged technological and other development. The federal government extended subsidies to help many fishermen build new vessels. It also set up the Fisheries Prices Support Board (1947), and in the 1950s extended unemployment insurance to self-employed fishermen and set up loan and vessel-insurance programs for fishermen.

Governments encouraged the exploitation of new commercial species, including redfish, flounders and other flatfish, crab, shrimp, and offshore scallops. Atlantic provincial loan boards offered advantageous interest rates to fishermen, allowing them to modernize their fleets, and helped support processing-plant expansion. In Newfoundland in the 1950s and 60s, Premier Joey Smallwood sponsored resettlement of small communities into "growth centres" such as Trepassey.

Development of fisheries increased as rising prosperity and refrigeration in homes, stores, and transportation and storage facilities led to increased demand for frozen fish, fundamentally changing the groundfish industry. A number of vertically integrated companies (combining fishing, processing, and marketing activities) operated large processing and freezing plants, each of which could employ hundreds of people in reliable jobs, often year-round. These larger companies built up a fleet of about 150 trawlers, which came to take nearly as much groundfish as the thousands of smaller boats, and dominated production and marketing. The major firms, consolidating to about half a dozen over time, operated large groundfish plants in more than 20 ports such as Lunenburg, Canso, Grand Bank, and Marystown, and also expanded into the lobster, scallop and herring fisheries.

But the development push resulted in crises stemming from overfishing and overcapacity. Overcapacity was the term used when fishermen’s ability to catch fish, using whatever technology was available to them, meant too many fish were being caught from a conservation perspective. In the 1960s, federal and provincial governments further encouraged purse-seining on the Atlantic, despite the example of overfished herring stocks on the Pacific coast, where fishing was banned from 1967 to 1972. Not just the large trawlers but boats in all sectors were multiplying their fishing power. Overexpansion in some areas, as fishermen raced to get the fish before their competitors, began depleting stocks and amplifying the industry's chronic problems of low incomes and instability. Few voices in government warned of the consequences of overfishing until the late 1960s. The International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF) made modest attempts to manage the international fishery, which took chiefly groundfish. ICNAF gathered comprehensive data on fish abundance and location and established mild controls such as mesh-size restrictions. But its goal was maximum sustainable yield (i.e. to harvest the most fish possible without endangering the species’ capacity to regenerate), and it lacked the power of enforcement and the political will to take effective conservation measures.

In BC, federal fisheries officials developed a superb corps of salmon managers after the war who kept stocks fairly stable, despite increasing pressure from the fishing fleet and from the encroachment of an urban-industrial society on fish habitats. The department led public opinion in a struggle that held back potential damage to salmon stocks from hydroelectric dams. BC fishermen's organizations such as the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union (UFAWU) and processor organizations actively influenced fishery management. The UFAWU pushed for licence controls to improve prospects for conservation and incomes; this came about in the late 1960s. Meanwhile, vessel ownership by processors decreased. The BC fleet became more independent and the salmon-canning industry increasingly consolidated. Still concentrated on salmon, herring, and halibut, the BC fishery had fewer resources and a far smaller fleet than did the Atlantic’s. But its fishermen tended to be better educated, and made more money. On both coasts and inland, many part-time fishermen supplemented their income with other work.

Comprehensive Management Begins: 1968-84

In this period, major fisheries on both coasts went through booms and crises, the latter usually stemming from overexpansion in an industry of fluctuating resources and markets. Key measures included limits on the number and size of vessels, and, especially on the Atlantic, use of fishing quotas and zones, encouragement of fishermen's organizations, and the establishment of many industry-government advisory committees. In 1979, the government created the stand-alone Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), responsible for fisheries management and research, oceanography, hydrography, and small craft harbours.

Recognition had spread that open fisheries tended to attract more fishermen and fishing power than they could support. To conserve supply and ensure incomes, licence limitation began in 1967-68 and encompassed all fisheries by the end of the 1970s. People had to acquire a licence, and the number of licenses was limited, though a single fisherman could hold licences for several fisheries. Although licences remained a government privilege and property, fishermen could in effect buy and sell them and there was no direct control on the number of fishermen fishing. Licensing policy restricted foreign ownership and, on the Atlantic, protected independent fishermen by an owner-operator rule and prohibition of corporate takeovers of licences (called the separate fleet rule).

Especially on the Atlantic, the federal fisheries department made increasing use of conservation quotas and fishing zones to limit and divide up the catch. Fishermen's organizations gained new strength, with Newfoundland leading the way. Fishermen and processors now took part in government-chaired advisory committees for every major fishery, and helped divide the quotas between fleet sectors.

While regulatory changes took place, challenges continued. The dwindling and problem-prone saltfish trade gained stability in Newfoundland and on Québec's North Shore after a federal crown corporation, the Canadian Saltfish Trade, took over marketing. In the mid-1970s foreign fishing became a national issue. Canada extended its fishing limits to 200 nautical miles from the coast (about 370 km) on 1 January 1977 (on 31 January 1997 the area became an Exclusive Economic Zone, see Law of the Sea). Canada influenced fishing provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which received international approval in 1982, and came into force in 1994.

As most foreign vessels left the Atlantic zone, federal fisheries authorities increased enforcement and doubled research. Strict quotas allowed groundfish stocks to start rebuilding. Scientists predicted strong growth especially for the northern cod stock off eastern Newfoundland and Labrador. The thinking was that holding the fleet stable and increasing the abundance of fish would benefit all. In the late 1970s and early 80s there was growth and relative prosperity in Atlantic fisheries. The federal fisheries department called for caution, while cutting back its industrial development work in fishing and processing. But Atlantic provincial governments, and at times the federal side as well, encouraged expansion.

Fishing power kept increasing. Although limited entry controlled the number and size of boats, the regulations often let vessel owners combine licences onto bigger, frequently subsidized craft. Bulkier vessels became more common, with modern electronics providing greater fish-finding ability. Despite rising catches, cost and market factors in the early 1980s drove the four largest groundfish processors, who controlled the offshore trawler fleet and influenced many other fisheries, close to bankruptcy. In spite of efforts to close or consolidate some large plants, communities successfully fought closures, and almost all the plants stayed in operation for the time being.

Overall, landings in the Atlantic — in other words, the part of the catch brought ashore — dropped largely due to the herring decline after the 1960s boom, but value rose to well above the inflation rate. Groundfish landings had increased significantly after the 200-mile limit was instituted, and were still on the upswing. With the groundfish crisis seemingly resolved and no major problems elsewhere, government and industry again looked forward to clear sailing.

Inland, the fishery in the prairie provinces, which was more prone to problems than the Great Lakes, gained stability in 1969 when the federal government set up the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation, a crown corporation marketing Prairie and northwest Ontario fish. On the Pacific, licence limitation for salmon began in 1968, and spread to other fisheries. Prosperity sped a move to more costly and powerful boats, made possible by licensing regulations, and the huge Salmonid Enhancement Program — started by the federal and provincial governments in 1977 — promised a doubling of salmon abundance.

During the early 1980s, little change took place, and industry fortunes improved. Despite frequent conflicts among fishing interests and growing rivalry with the Aboriginal and recreational fisheries, the Pacific commercial fishery was again faring well by 1984.

Groping for Stability: 1984- Present

By the mid-1980s, Canada was leading the world in fish exports. Catches and values were setting all-time records. On the Atlantic, scientists expected abundant cod and other groundfish, while fearing possible declines in lobster. Overall, the Atlantic industry seemed to be entering a golden age of prosperity and self-supporting stability. The Pacific, too, was heading toward record salmon catches.

Quotas

In the 1980s the federal government phased out various development and assistance programs. First on the Atlantic and later on the Pacific, government and industry in many fisheries turned to a new form of quota management, which seemed to promise stability and efficiency. From the 1950s on, fishery experts had bemoaned the common-property nature of the industry, with its tendency towards overexpansion and crisis. Licence limitation didn’t reduce a vessel’s ability to efficiently harvest fish; in fact, ships seemed to be making their catch with increasing effectiveness. From the late 1970s, after a pioneering venture in the Bay of Fundy purse-seine fishery, the idea of individual quotas (IQs) spread widely. IQs offered the potential to end the destructive "race for the fish." Instead of building bigger, more expensive boats to compete for the best share of an overall quota, fishermen could pace their fishing to their own needs and the market's requirements. A greater sense of ownership through these quasi-property rights was expected to encourage fishermen to conserve stocks better. Soon after, individual transferable quotas (ITQs) were developed, which could be bought and sold, letting a smaller number of enterprises consolidate quotas, typically under guidelines preventing excessive concentration.

Quasi-property rights, especially ITQs, caused a continuing dispute, most pronounced in the Atlantic region. Proponents held that if a smaller number of participants could gradually buy up fishing privileges, the industry would become more stable and businesslike. Some also criticized the smaller-boat fishery as a seasonal, less-efficient social operation highly dependent on unemployment insurance, and pushed for an end to the owner-operator and separate-fleet rules restricting corporate operations. Opponents charged that IQs and ITQs amounted to a privatization of the fishery, with the richest parties getting the benefits. They feared that larger interests would gather up licences and quotas and leave whole communities at the mercy of private-company decisions, leading to a subversion of the 1970s policy that aimed to keep smaller boats in the hands of independent operators, bringing a net economic loss while profiting a few. In the opinion of the independent and smaller operators, smaller boats and plants could be just as efficient as the crisis-prone larger companies and could spread the money among more people and communities, imparting a social value. They championed smaller boats fishing various species throughout the season, against the larger, specialized craft often favoured by ITQ advocates.

As time went by, many independents also blamed IQs and ITQs for conservation problems, particularly in the Atlantic trawler fleet operating under "enterprise allocations." They charged that Department of Fisheries and Oceans couldn't enforce so many different quotas, and that IQ or ITQ-holders tended to overfish, dump fish, and misreport, all in order to weed out lower-value fish from their quota. In response, the federal government forced licence-holders in many fisheries to set up privately funded dockside-monitoring systems to inspect catches.

Although they still cause great disagreement, ITQs or other "quasi-property rights" seem destined to remain and perhaps spread. On the Atlantic they prevail in such fisheries as offshore groundfish, some midshore groundfish, Gulf crab, herring, and the offshore fisheries for lobster, clams and northern shrimp. On the Pacific, ITQs or related schemes spread into herring, halibut, and other fisheries, with some proposing them for salmon. ITQ schemes have drawn charges not only of harming fish stocks and benefiting only larger interests, but also of hiking the capital value of licences and quotas beyond the reach of independent fishermen. But in some instances, IQ and ITQ regimes appear to have brought undeniable benefits to both conservation and incomes. Often they have given industry a stronger voice in management of the stocks, although the beneficiaries may be vessel-owning companies rather than independent fishermen. Such arrangements have tended to work best where operators are relatively few in number and have a lot in common. For Canada as a whole, quota licences accounted for more than half of landed value in the late 1990s.

Codfish Moratorium

Atlantic landings reached a record of more than 1.4 million tonnes in 1988, with groundfish well in the lead. The total landed value was over a sbillion dollars. In Newfoundland, however, inshore fishermen complained that northern cod were getting scarce. By 1989, federal scientists called for a drastic reduction in northern cod catches. Federal cabinet ministers of the day kept quotas higher than recommended. In 1992, 15 years after the introduction of the 200-mile zone, Fisheries and Oceans Minister John Crosbie imposed a moratorium on the now-decimated northern cod fishery. Closures followed for other major stocks of cod, haddock, and other groundfish. Total groundfish catches sank from 734,000 tonnes in 1988 to 96,000 tonnes in 1995, and the total value dropped from $373 to $102 million. Some 40,000 persons, mostly plant employees, lost work in the Atlantic provinces and Québec. Richard Cashin, leader of the Newfoundland-based Fishermen Food and Allied Workers Union, called it "a famine of Biblical scale - a great destruction." Though some groundfish stocks reopened at lower levels in the 1990s, the fishery continues to be troubled.

Environmental changes, foreign fishing at the edge of the 200-mile zone (which only Canadian fishermen can fish within), and predation by growing herds of harp seals may all have had an impact on groundfish stocks, but no one has weighed the factors definitively. Many observers blamed Canadian overfishing and a management system that, though sound on paper, in hindsight had grave weaknesses, and not only in groundfish. In the young and difficult science of population dynamics, scientists had apparently overestimated both fish stocks and their own expertise. In the early 1980s, they predicted grave problems for Atlantic lobster and huge increases of groundfish. A decade later, lobster catches had more than doubled and groundfish had collapsed. Fishing power kept growing, especially for finfish. Despite limits on the length and number of boats, fishermen got broader, deeper, better ones, with improved electronics. Never easy, enforcement became more complex with the spread of hundreds of group and individual quotas. Fishermen evading quotas skewed catch statistics and weakened scientific stock assessments. Provinces made little attempt to control the rapid growth of processing capacity, in fact, most encouraged it.

"Limited entry" had controlled only the number of fishing licences. The number of registered fishermen increased from about 35,000 in the mid-1970s to about 60,000 by the 1990s. Many of these were fishermen’s helpers, using the fishery as a gateway to unemployment insurance benefits. Overcrowding, overinvestment, and overdependence continued to limit average incomes. Meanwhile, lack of communication and of shared information caused friction and fragmentation. Inshore fishermen opposed offshore, small opposed large, and different gear types opposed one another. Many fishermen mistrusted DFO science and management, and withheld cooperation on catch reports and other matters. Fishermen often felt powerless, seeing government as the enemy, and resisting attempts at regulation or co-ordination. Government rarely made systematic attempts to collect fishermen's knowledge.

The two largest, "restructured" groundfish companies, National Sea and Fishery Products International, survived the 1990s closures, but divested themselves of most of their large trawlers and many plants. They depended more on independently owned boats, other species and products, and on imported fish for processing and trading. In 1999 National Sea Products changed its name to High Liner Foods Inc. Many smaller groundfish plants closed, particularly in Newfoundland.

Moving Forward

In 1993 DFO set up the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (FRCC), bringing together government scientists and officials, industry representatives, and academics. The FRCC makes recommendations on groundfish quotas, which are generally followed by government officials. Foreign fishing, although tightly restricted within the 200-mile zone, drew some blame for depleting stocks at the outskirts of the zone. In 1995, under Minister Brian Tobin, Canada arrested the Spanish trawler Estai outside the 200-mile zone, precipitating an international dispute, but also initiating better behaviour by European fleets. Meanwhile, Canada spearheaded pursuit of the United Nations Fish Agreement, which came into force in 2001, to improve control of fishing outside national zones. Under the Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (TAGS) and related programs, the federal government provided more than $4 billion in assistance to reduce economic dependence on the fisheries.

Licence reduction programs, other licensing changes, and the misfortunes of the industry further reduced participation. Although Atlantic fishing power remained high, the number of boats and the number of registered fishermen dropped by about one-third by 2000.

While the groundfish industry collapsed, fishing for species in open seas as well as fishing for lobster, crab and shrimp posed no problems during the same period. Shellfish displaced groundfish as the dominant fishery and, although it produced fewer processing jobs, the shellfish boom brought a record-breaking increase in Atlantic landed value, from $954 million in 1990 to $1.8 billion in 2002. In the wake of the groundfish collapse, the federal fisheries department faced budget cuts in the mid-1990s. In a government reorganization, the DFO merged with the Canadian Coast Guard and fish inspection responsibilities moved to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The DFO began to re-emphasize its core mandate of conservation, together with self-supporting viability in the industry. Some industry groups, typically from more homogeneous and better-off fisheries, began to contribute funds for research and enforcement and to run certain aspects of management. Especially in Newfoundland and Québec, federal and provincial governments and industry were moving towards higher professional standards and training of fishermen. Licensing rules seemed to have improved stability, even though high costs for licences, boats, and quotas were in some cases discouraging new independent entrants and fostering more corporate control. Though never calm, the Atlantic fishery at century's end seemed less turbulent than in the recent past.

Aboriginal peoples, who had a well-established fishery in pre-European times, played a small role in Atlantic commercial fisheries. In 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada's Sparrow decision opened the way for more Aboriginal participation in food, social, and ceremonial fisheries. The DFO put in place a national Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy, to foster Aboriginal participation in research, management, and the commercial fishery. In 1999, a Supreme Court decision — called the Marshall decision — recognized treaty rights in the commercial fishery for 34 bands on the Atlantic. The DFO negotiated agreements with most of these bands, providing access to boats, licences, and quotas. Millions of dollars were paid out to commercial fishermen who voluntarily retired their licences in favour of giving them to Aboriginal people.

British Columbia has traditionally had better-educated, better-organized, and more highly urbanized fishermen. Salmon landings and overall fishery values were high in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even so, BC fishermen felt they were losing influence to the recreational and the small but growing Aboriginal fishery, and were being robbed by America’s failure to fully comply with the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty. The latter issue was addressed by a new agreement in 1999. Meanwhile, salmon landings took a drastic decline in the mid-1990s. Half a century earlier, regulations had let most boats fish nearly every day of the season, but by 1997, controls brought on by the strong fleet and weak stocks kept many boats tied up for 10 or 11 months of the year, with chinook and coho salmon showing serious signs of decline. Besides fishing pressure and habitat loss, oceanic changes affecting survival seemed to be a key cause.

Other BC fisheries such as herring, halibut, other groundfish including sablefish, and shellfish proceeded well enough for the most part. Many were gaining in value, helped in some instances by ITQs. But the salmon fishery had struck not only a resource but a market disaster. Prices plunged as aquaculture poured more supplies into the world market. Though still small compared to leading countries, Canadian aquaculture was growing fast. By 2002, production value reached $639 million, mostly from farmed Atlantic salmon, which even Pacific fish farmers had taken up. BC provided more than half of Canada's aquaculture value.

In BC's wild-salmon fishery, strict conservation policies in the late 1990s including fishing cutbacks and gear modifications helped reduce pressure on chinook, coho, and salmon in general. Starting in 1996, federal programs and industry conditions reduced participation in the BC fishery. The number of licensed fishermen and fishing craft in the industry dropped. Although major corporations remained, some even taking a stronger ownership position in the salmon fleet, the number of large, industrial salmon canneries declined to a handful. The processing and marketing sectors became less industrial and more entrepreneurial.

At century's end, despite discouraging short-term prospects for salmon and herring and some uncertainty in coastal communities, the resilient BC fishery had hopes of continuing as a dynamic industry. The freshwater fisheries also seemed at least halfway stable, with many participants using IQs or ITQs, and with the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation still strong on the Prairies.

At the beginning of the new century, co-operation and co-management seemed to be increasing, and incomes were reasonable in many areas. As modern technology strengthened fish-catching skills, other factors loomed larger in fishermen's fates, namely their abilities in business, in representation and in acquiring the right licences. On both coasts, the fishery, despite its complex, contentious, and crisis-filled history, retained a special pull. Even in bad times, many fishermen not only had no way but also no desire to get out of the occupation that had shaped their families, communities and culture. Despite all the troubles, many still find it a satisfying business. Working alone on the water, the fisherman lives with challenges and perceptions largely unknown to the rest of us.

Friday, November 27, 2015

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