DESPATCHES, BEPOBTS, COBBESPONDENCE, ETC. 317 



pest. Gloucester has tried to provide for these bereft people, by 

 every fisherman voluntarily paying a small percentage of his earn- 

 ings to constitute a widow's and orphans' fund. Even the tempestu- 

 ous Magdalene Islands are safer for vessels than are the inshore 

 coasts of those islands, where we are now permitted to fish; their 

 harbors are poor, their entrances are shallowed by sand-bars, which 

 are shifting, which shift with every very high wind, and sometimes 

 with the season. They are well enough after you get inside them, 

 but they are dangerous to enter to persons inexperienced, dangerous 

 to any by night; and if a vessel is caught near the shore by a wind 

 blowing inshore, against which she cannot beat with sails, for none of 

 them carry steam, then she is in immediate peril. They therefore 

 give a wide berth to the inshore fisheries in the main. They resort to 

 them only occasionally. They are not useful for fishing with our 

 seines. We find that the purse-seines are too deep ; that they are cut 

 by the ground, which is rocky ; that it is impossible to shorten them 

 without scaring the mackerel, which must be taken by seines run out 

 a great distance, for they are very quick of sight, and very suspicious 

 of man ; and they soon find their way out of the seines, unless they 

 are laid a considerable distance off. 



We need not catch our mackerel bait, any more than our cod bait, 

 within the three-mile limit. On the contrary, the best mackerel bait 

 in the world is the menhaden, which we bring from New England. 

 All admit that. The British witnesses say they would use it were it 

 not that it is too costly. They have to buy it from American vessels; 

 and they betake themselves to an inferior kind of bait when they 

 cannot afford to buy the best bait from us. And another result is that 

 the Americans have shown for many years that what are called the 

 shore mackerel, that is, those that are caught off the coast of Massa- 

 chusetts and several other of the New England States, are really 

 better than the bay mackerel. The evidence of that is the market 

 prices they bring. It is not a matter of opinion. We have not called 

 as witnesses persons who have only tasted them, and might have 

 prejudices or peculiar tastes, but we have shown the market value. 

 ******* 



It was not until about the year 1830 that this great change in the 

 fisheries themselves came in, when they ceased to be exclusively cod 

 fisheries, and became mainly mackerel fisheries. Then the importance 

 of landing upon the shores to dry our nets and cure our fish was re- 

 duced to nothing; I mean practically nothing. We .put it in the 

 Treaty of 1871, but it has never been proved that we made any use of 

 that liberty or power. 



The advent of the mackerel one of those strange mutations which 

 seem to govern those mysterious creatures of the sea the advent 

 of the mackerel to this region, and to Massachusetts Bay, put a new 

 countenance upon all this matter. It undoubtedly gave an advantage 

 to the British side, and put us at once to somewhat of a disadvantage. 

 Then came the demand of the islanders and of the people of the 

 Dominion, and others, to carry into effect this exclusive system, to 

 drive our fishermen off, not only from the three-mile line, as we 

 understand it, but from the three-mile line as any captain of a cruiser 

 chose to understand it. Nobody knew what the three-mile line was. 

 ******* 



