154 FISHERIES OF THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC 



que account of the country, the people and the fisheries. These 

 interesting details are found in a letter, in the Archbishop's 

 Palace at Quebec, addressed by M. Ferland to the Bishop of 

 Tloa, then the Administrator of the Diocese of Quebec. He 

 stated that up to forty years before his visit there was not a 

 single woman of European origin on the coast of the Lower 

 Canadian Labrador. Most of the men on that coast were 

 fishermen, arrived during the first twenty years of the cen- 

 tury from Berthier, en ~bas, and were either unmarried, or 

 had left their wives and families behind, sometimes return- 

 ing home for the winter, and in some instances endeavouring 

 to save enough to make a home on the coast for those de- 

 pendent upon them. At the time of Abbe Ferland 's visit, 

 he met some forty of these families established on the coast, 

 all of whom were from the South Shore. Only shortly before 

 his visit, there had been quite an immigration to Labrador 

 from the Magdalen Islands. 



The deplorable conditions of the land tenure on these 

 Islands, introduced by Admiral Coffin in 1798, and per- 

 petuated by his heirs, entailed such misery upon the land 

 holders that many of them preferred expatriation to the con- 

 tinuance of a life of servitude. A special commission investi- 

 gated the land tenure conditions of the islands in 1864, but it 

 was not until the passage of the Act 58 Vic., chap. XLV, in 

 1895, by the Legislature of Quebec that such a measure of 

 relief was accorded to the occupants of lands on the islands 

 as to constitute them the real proprietors of their own lands 

 and homes. Twenty Acadian families from these Islands had 

 come to Pointe des Esquimaux about 1855 and were engaged 

 in fishing and a little farming on their own account. A similar 

 colony consisting of about fifteen families settled at Natash- 

 quan in the following year and were expecting to be followed 

 by others. 



Faucher de St. Maurice, nearly twenty years later, re- 

 ported that no less than 300 heads of families had left "Le 

 Eoyaume du Poisson" as the Magdalens were picturesquely 



