INTERNATIONAL FISHERIES 29 



Before the close of the seventeenth century Ponchartrain in 

 Bradore Bay was substituted for Brest as the rallying-place 

 for the fishermen of Le Petit Nord and Belle Isle Strait. The 

 Great Bank of Newfoundland may be described as a third 

 French — or, rather, French-Portuguese — sphere, into which 

 Englishmen did not intrude until the eighteenth century. 



The two French coastal spheres impinged upon Indian {within the 

 spheres of action. Indians had a village on St. George Bay ^/^^^^ ^^ 

 in 1594, and haunted the shores of White Bear Bay (?) -^^^^^V^) 

 (1538) and Placentia Bay (1594), but it is not quite clear 

 whether these Indians were Micmacs from the continent, or 

 were the Beothics or native Indians of Newfoundland. The 

 Beothics, according to Whitbourne (161 8), were confined to 

 the west shore, and to the east shore north of, and including 

 Trinity Bay, but Whitbourne only knew the east shore at 

 first hand. Probably the Beothics always had their homes 

 inland by the great lakes and rivers — which no European 

 knew of until late in the eighteenth century — and only 

 visited the Bays in summer, in order to catch wingless auks 

 and breeding birds, which covered every rocky islet 'thick 

 as stones on a paved street ', ' or grass on a field '} We have 

 no certain knowledge that these visits extended to the west 

 and south shores. On the east coast these annual visitors 

 served as a buffer state, which kept Englishmen and French- 

 men apart. There is no evidence that the Beothics were 

 ever numerous or ever tamed. In 1597, 'three hundred 

 savages ' helped two hundred Frenchmen against an English 

 privateer on the Magdalen Islands ; and it is fairly certain 

 that they were Micmacs imported for that purpose from the 

 continent. Similar scattered references to Frenchmen and 

 Indians hunting together on the south coasts of Newfound- 

 land suggest the same explanation. 



Trinity Bay must have been well known from early times, 



1 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, vol. viii, pp. 181, 192. The 

 breeding birds included murres {Uria^, razor-bills {Alca torda), &c. 



