8 FISHERIES OF THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC 



The Vinland of the Danes and Scandinavians, which 

 they claim to have discovered about 1000 A.D., and which 

 Rafn 1 and his followers place on the coast of Massachusetts, 

 is held by a number of respectable authorities 2 to have been 

 in the neighbourhood of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and their 

 "Helluland" has been identified, to the satisfaction of care- 

 ful investigators, as the coast of Labrador. 



There is equally good reason to suppose that Cabot's 

 landfall of the 24th June, 1497, when he first sighted the New 

 World, was upon the Coast of Labrador, as claimed by Mr. 

 J. P. Howley, F.R.G.S., of Newfoundland, though the ma- 

 jority of Mr. Howley's fellow-countrymen claim the honour 

 for Cape Bonavista. 



The early records of the Newfoundland fisheries specially 

 interest us, because they naturally and necessarily deal with 

 the early history of the industry in what are now Canadian 

 waters. In fact the name Newfoundland was applied, in the 

 sixteenth century, not only to the island colony, but also to 

 Nova-Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward's Island and the 

 islands and coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, even down 

 to the State of Maine. Foreigners called these countries by 

 the generic name of the ' ' Baccalaos ' ' the land of dried cod- 

 fish. 3 



Irish, Welsh, Bretons, and Basques." Notes on the Coast of Labra- 

 dor. A Paper by Samuel Robertson of Spar Point, read before the 

 Literary and Historical Society of Quebec by Dr. Morrin, on the 

 16th January, 1841. Transactions of the Society, Vol. IV., pp. 30, 31. 

 "The Basques and Bretons were for several centuries the only 

 ones who were employed in the whale and cod fisheries and it is 

 very remarkable that Sebastien Cabot, when discovering the coast 

 of Labrador, found there the name of Bacallaos, which signifies cod 

 in the language of the Basques." MS. in the Royal Library of 

 Versailles cited by Parkman. 



1 In his Antiquates Americanae, published in 1837. 



2 Amongst others, Paul Henri Mallet in his Histoire de Dan- 

 nemarc, Barrow in his Voyages to the Arctic Regions (London. 

 1818), J. Elliot Cabot, in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Vol. 

 II., Dahlmann in his Forschungen (Vol. 1), and J. P. Howley, 

 F.R.G.S., of Newfoundland. 



s History of Newfoundland by D. N. Prowse (London, 1896), 

 p. 23. 



