214 



HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



and beyond 

 Cape Ray 

 to St. 

 George 

 Bay, where 

 the herring 

 fishery was 

 para- 

 mount, 



to Bay of 

 Islands, 

 where the 

 herring 

 fishery 

 began after 



heard of Frenchmen trespassing for bait on Burgeo Islets, 

 and under the Treaty of 1818 Americans had curing and 

 drying rights on unsettled parts of the south coast. Long 

 before 1850 there was not a single unsettled landing-place on 

 the south coast, so that French trespasses became impossible, 

 and American rights obsolete. 



On rounding Cape Ray we enter upon other scenes with 

 other associations. St. George Bay dated from 1783 or 

 thereabouts, was a considerable centre of trade, and its 

 inhabitants numbered 750 in 1848, or, including the coast 

 between Port-a-Port and Cape Ray, 1,500 in I856. 1 Its 

 principal fish was the herring, not the cod, and the principal 

 market for the herring was neither Europe nor Brazil, but 

 the Maritime Provinces, whither twenty-nine schooners used, 

 in 1856, to sail thrice every year. The close connexion of 

 the West Coast of Newfoundland with the Maritime Provinces 

 was then, and is still its distinguishing characteristic. In the 

 Forties the herring industry of St. George Bay was prover- 

 bial for its brevity, for the herring were caught mostly in nets 

 in two weeks of May, and the fishermen had little to do in 

 winter except to make staves and ships, and to catch eels, 

 which, unlike the herring, were perennial. 2 Every creek 

 between Port-a-Port Bay and Cape Ray had its family or 

 two; in summer, British fishermen joined them from Cape 

 Breton Island, and French codders fished off Codroy Island 

 and Red Island, where they built stages and flakes, and 

 employed during their absence English caretakers, even as 

 they had employed English caretakers on the east coast in 

 i6i4. 3 Between Port-a-Port and the Bay of Islands there 

 were few or no settlers ; at the Bay of Islands there were six 

 or eight families in 1839, anc * twenty families in different 

 creeks in 1848, one family being from Burin and several 



1 Canning, Report, in Accounts and Papers, 1857, vol. xvi,No. 2201. 



2 Canning's Report, uli supra. 



3 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, Add. 1574-1674, 1614, 

 No. 88. 



