MISCELLANEOUS. 1199 



cod and herring by the fishermen of Restigouche and Northumberland 

 has fallen off more than half, and in Kent has nearly become extinct. 

 But the inhabitants of the port of Caraquet, availing themselves of 

 the advantages of their position, have actually produced a large pro- 

 portion of the dried cod exported from the colony for some years. 

 These four counties are more remote from the capital of New Bruns- 

 wick, and from the markets of the United States, than the county of 

 Charlotte, which embraces Grand Menan, and the other islands in the 

 Bay of Fundy, (where the fish are so badly cured,) and the attention 

 of the people is divided between several branches of industry; but 

 fishing, as an occasional and irregular employment merely, has com- 

 monly proved a source of profit, or at least has afforded a fair reward 

 for the labor and capital devoted to it. The fish shipped at Caraquet 

 are in much better repute than those caught in the Bay of Fundy, 

 and the remark is true of the produce of the Bay of Chaleurs and St. 

 Lawrence fisheries generally. It may be presumed that there the 

 herring does not "become rotten before salting;" that, when sold as 

 the "gibbed" article, it is not packed without taking out the entrails; 

 and that the cod is washed after being split, and not "salted and put 

 in 'kinch' in all its blood and dirt." 



This brief notice of the fisheries of New Brunswick would be incom- 

 plete without a description of the boat-fisherman of the Bay of Fundy, 

 whose professional faults I have so severely rebuked. Bred to the use 

 of boats from his earliest youth, he displays astonishing skill in their 

 management, and great boldness in his adventures. He will cross, in 

 the stormiest weather, from island to island, and go from passage to 

 passage, through frightful whirls of tides, which suddenty meet and part 

 with a loud roar;* and he will dive headlong, as it were, upon rocks 

 and bars, merely to show how easily he can shun them, or how readily 

 and certainly he can "go about" and "stand off on the other tack."f 

 He is neither a landsman nor a seaman, a soldier nor a marine; but you 

 would think by his talk that he could appear to advantage in either of 

 these characters. He is neither a merchant nor a mechanic, and yet 

 he can buy and sell, mend and make, as expertly as either. In the 

 healing art he is wise above all others, and fancies that he possesses a 

 sovereign specific for every ailment which all the world beside con- 

 siders as incurable. He holds nautical instruments in high derision: 

 for the state of the moon and the weather predictions of the almanac, 

 the peculiar sound of the sea when it "moans," and the particular 

 size or shape of a "cat's paw" or "glin" in the sky, lead him to far 

 surer results. He will undertake nothing of consequence upon a 



. * The ordinary rise and fall of the tide is twenty-two feet. The rapidity with which 

 it rushes by the points of land, and through the narrow straits between the islands, 

 creates dangerous cross-tides, eddies, and whirlpools. 



t In returning from a cruise to the coast, says the author of "Eothen," "You see often 

 enough a fisherman's humble boat far away from all shores, with an ugly black sky 

 above, and an angry sea beneath; you watch the grisly old man at the helm, carrying 

 his craft with strange skill through the turmoil of waters, and the boy, supple-limbed, 

 yet weather-worn already, and with steady eyes that look through the blast, you see 

 him understanding commandments from the jerk of his father's white eye-brow r 

 now belaying, and now letting go now scrunching himself down into mere ballast, 

 or baling out death with a pipkin. Stale enough is the sight; and yet when I see it 

 I always stare anew, and with a kind of Titanic exultation, because that a poor boat, 

 with the brain of a man and the hands of a boy on board, can match herseli so bravely 

 against black heaven and ocean," &c. 



