FISHERIES OF NOVA SCOTIA. 9 



closed up hy ice. This latter circumstance, if a railway 

 should be made from Halifax to the St Lawrence, ought 

 to place the West India trade of a large portion of the 

 Canadas and of New Brunswick in the hands of the Nova 

 Scotia merchants — while all the circumstances taken 

 together will doubtless, in the end, make them the chief 

 purveyors of fish both to Europe and America. At pre- 

 sent, they complain of the bounties given by their several 

 Governments to the French and United States fishermen. 

 But bounties are in all countries only a temporary expe- 

 dient : one part of a people gets tired at last, of paying 

 another part to do what is not otherwise profitable ; 

 bounties are therefore abolished, and employment in con- 

 sequence languishes. The fisheries of Nova Scotia are 

 the surer to last that they are permitted or encouraged 

 to spring up naturally, without artificial stimulus, and in 

 the face of an ardent competition. 



Of the coast fisheries, the most important to the trade 

 of Halifax is that of mackerel. This fish abounds along 

 the whole shores, but the best takes are usually made in 

 the Gulf of St Lawrence, off the shores of Cape Breton 

 and Prince Edward's Island, and especially at Canseau, 

 wdiere the quantity of fish has been '^ so great at times as 

 actually to obstruct navigation.''^'^' The excitement caused 

 by the arrival of a shoal of mackerel, is thus described 

 by Judge Haliburton, in The Old Judge: — 



" Well, when our friends the mackarel strike in towards 

 the shore, and travel round the province to the northward, 

 the whole coasting population is on the stir too. Perhaps 

 there never was seen, under the blessed light of the sun, 

 anything like the everlasting number of mackarel in one 

 shoal on our sea-coast. Millions is too little a word for 

 it ; acres of them is too small a tarm to give a right 

 notion ; miles of them, perhaps, is more like the thing ; 



* Gesner's Industrial Resources, p. 124. 



