BAIT-FISH EXPANSION AND CONFLICT 221 



rights enjoyed by the community of Newfoundland are not 

 to be ceded or exchanged without their consent ', which con- 

 sent ' is regarded as the essential preliminary to any modifica- 

 tion of their territorial or maritime rights '. l Accordingly 

 Newfoundland, which had just received responsible govern- 

 ment, was consulted, and spurned the Treaty, especially 

 that part of it which referred to bait. The agitation which 

 Newfoundlanders initiated in opposition to the proposed 

 compromise was carried on, not only in their island home, 

 but in Nova Scotia, where it is said to have promoted that 

 scheme of North American confederation which Lord 

 Durham proposed in 1839, and which Canadians consum- 

 mated in 1867, but from which Newfoundland ever after- 

 wards held aloof. The old difficulties were unresolved, and and by a 

 things went jogging along in the same old ruts and with the ^f 1 ^ naval 

 same 'unthinking acquiescence as in the early days of the regimes. 

 History of Newfoundland. 



Just as the opposing parties were settling down lazily and Then the 

 happily into the old primitive habits there crawled across the ^(^ t j ie 

 political arena ' a large, marine, stalk-eyed, ten-footed, long- arena, c. 

 tailed crustacean of the genus Homarus, much used for food, ' 

 and of a brilliant red when boiled.' The ugly ridiculous 

 lobster thrust its claws into the tangle and all was confusion. 

 Both Frenchmen and Englishmen, inspired by the lobster, 

 began to go crooked. 



Nova Scotians began to tin salmon and lobsters at the Bay British 

 of Islands in 1858, and lobsters only at St. Barbe in 1873, to -^f^. 

 and at Brig Bay, a few miles north of St. Barbe, in i88o. 2 haps, 

 Port Saunders in Ingornachoix Bay, where Chappell admired /^^/^ 

 lobsters in 1813, was the next factory, and on the west coast being dear- 

 between St. George Bay and St. Barbe in August, 1887, there 

 were twelve British lobster-factories, three-fourths of which ies 



1 March 26, 1857. 



2 Correspondence respecting the Newfoundland fisheries, 1890, vol. 

 Ixxxi, p. 37 (c. 6044); Dispatch, Jan. 26, 1889. 



