ARGUMENT OF CHARLES B. WARREN. 1157 



resorting to the small bays, harbours, and creeks of the British pos- 

 sessions in North America and it is, fortunately for the present pur- 

 pose, quite immaterial to determine the justice of those claims on 

 behalf of Great Britain, or the justice of the claims asserted by the 

 masters of American fishing vessels. It is apparent that these dis- 

 putes arose from the interpretation put upon the proviso clause of 

 the treaty that a vessel, when resorting to harbours for one of the 

 four purposes provided in the clause, should be in evident distress, 

 or in evident need of repairs, or in evident need of wood or water. 



Sir Robert Finlay, in his oral argument, after reviewing the 

 698 operations of the fishing-vessels of the United States seized 

 in the Bay of Fundy in 1824, said on p. 73 of the report of 

 his very able argument : 



" So that I claim to have shown that there is no ground for the 

 very important allegation made on behalf of the United States that, 

 during this period from 1819 to 1836, the American fishermen fished 

 in the Bay of Fundy and in other similar bays as of right and with- 

 out being challenged until they came within three miles of the shore. 

 The truth is that the question of fishing in the bays was not, at that 

 time, one of any importance and that it was only about the year 

 1836 that the question of fishing in the bays became of importance 

 owing to the circumstance that the mackerel supply on the American 

 coasts, failed, and that the American fishermen came to the coasts of 

 the British possessions, and notably into the Bay of Fundy in pur- 

 suit of mackerel. It was then, and not till then, that the controversy 

 as to bays came out. The attempt to show that the right was asserted 

 before 1836 fails." 



Learned counsel rests this argument upon the assumption that the 

 mackerel fishery was the only fishery pursued by American fishing 

 vessels in the bays and that the mackerel, about 1836, abandoned the 

 coasts of the United States, and that it was not until after that time, 

 or about that time, that American fishing vessels resorted to these 

 large bodies of water adjacent to the British possessions. 



The chief support for this position is the statement made by Mr. 

 Tuck in a speech, in 1852, in the House of Representatives. Mr. 

 Tuck was a representative from the State of New Hampshire, which 

 has a very limited frontage on the Atlantic Ocean, some few miles 

 only, and he, evidently, as far as anyone knows, had no special 

 knowledge about the fisheries. But I am not going to rest any con- 

 tradiction of Mr. Tuck's statement upon any general remarks that 

 may be made by counsel now as to the special information possessed 

 by Mr. Tuck in 1852, but I shall proceed to show what Mr. Tuck was 

 talking about and where he drew his information from, and will 

 show how extensively fishing operations were carried on in those 

 days before the mackerel came in 1836, as claimed by counsel for 

 Great Britain. 



