PREFACE VI 1 



The example of fishermen and hunters makes stay-at- 

 homes stray from home ; and most of those who 

 follow this example are neither fishermen nor hunters, 

 but settlers. Then comes a crisis. Hunters and fisher- 

 men oppose settlers — for settlers and wild beasts are 

 incompatible; and there is war — as in Manitoba — in 

 which wild beasts and hunters disappear ; or there is 

 absorption — even as the whalers of Cook Strait, New 

 Zealand, were merged into the settlers, and the whales 

 disappeared ; or there is absorption of another kind 

 and all the settlers are transformed into fishermen, 

 and none of the fish disappear. This last process 

 took place in Newfoundland, and nowhere else in the 

 world. Indeed, there are few other places in the world 

 where fishing could have continued, if all the settlers, 

 who followed in the wake of all the fishermen, had 

 become fishermen. It continued and continues in 

 Newfoundland, first because the fisheries are practically 

 inexhaustible, secondly because creeks and nooks in 

 or from which fishing can be carried on by settlers 

 are practically innumerable. 



Therefore for many centuries fishermen, who went and 

 fished off Newfoundland but returned yearly to their 

 cottages in the south-west of England, existed side by 

 side with colonists who lived and fished in Newfound- 

 land ; so that the colony was something more than 

 a fishing ground, and something less than a colony, in 

 the sense in which the word colony is generally used. 

 Regarded by itself and apart Newfoundland was only 

 half alive. It still remained a physical part of its 

 mother. Thus Fishery proved the earliest and greatest 



