INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT. 9 



American right of fishery, and the proposed limitation of the shores, 

 which the Americans might use for drying and curing, Mr. Oswald 

 exercised his discretionary powers and assented to an article along 

 the general lines, which had been insisted upon by the American 

 Commissioners. 



The agreement thus reached, which became Article III of the pro- 

 visional treaty, and was without change incorporated in the defini- 

 tive treaty of September 3, 1783, is as follows: 



It is agreed that the people of the United States shall continue 

 to enjoy unmolested the right to take fish of every kind on the Grand 

 Bank, and on all the other banks of Newfoundland ; also in the Gulph 

 of Saint Lawrence, and at all other places in the sea where the in- 

 habitants of both countries used at any time heretofore to fish. And 

 also that the inhabitants of the United States shall have liberty to 

 take fish of every kind on such part of the coast of Newfoundland as 

 British fishermen shall use (but not to dry or cure the same on that 

 island) and also on the coasts, bays and creeks of all other of His 

 Britannic Majesty's dominions in America; and that the American 

 fishermen shall have liberty to dry and cure fish in any of the un- 

 settled bays, harbours and creeks of Nova Scotia, Magdalen Islands, 

 and Labrador, so long as the same shall remain unsettled; but so 

 soon as the same or either of them shall be settled, it shall not be 

 lawful for the said fishermen to dry or cure fish at uch settlements, 

 without a previous agreement for that purpose with the inhabitants, 

 proprietors or possessors of the ground. 



Under these treaty provisions the American fishermen continued 

 to enjoy unmolested the rights of fishery in all the bays, creeks, and 

 harbors of the coasts of the British colonies and of resort to their 

 shores for the space of thirty years, when the War of 1812 between the 

 United States and Great Britain interrupted the industry, and raised 

 an issue between the two Governments as to the permanency of the 

 American rights. This issue related to the second clause of the 

 fishery article of the treaty, by which Great Britain recognized the 

 right of American fishermen to fish in the inshore waters of the 

 British possessions and to use the strand for curing and drying their 

 fish. These provisions the United States declared to be permanent 

 and not abrogated by the war, on the ground that in the partition of 

 the British empire in America by the treaty of 1783 the act of parti- 

 tion applied in the same way to the fisheries that it did to the terri- 

 tory, and that, since the division of territory survived the war, so the 

 division of the fisheries survived. Great Britain, on the other hand, 

 insisted that the American rights in the inshore fisheries and to the 



