295 



cafled his attention to it. *•.' From the information in the possession of the, 

 department," he observed : 



"It appears that the provincial authorities assume a right to exclude 

 American vessels from all their bays, even including those of Fundy 

 and Chaleurs, and to prohibit their approach within three miles of a 

 line drawn from headland to headland. These authorities also claim 

 a right to exclude our vessels from resorting to their ports unless in 

 actual distress, and American vessels are accordingly warned, to depart, 

 or ordered to get under weigh and leave a harbor, whenevei: the pro- 

 vincial custom-house or British naval officer supposes, without a full 

 examination of the circumstances under which they entered, that they 

 have been there a reasonable time." 



As yet, however, the colonists had not ventured to enforce the pre- 

 tension they had set up. Lord Falkland, in a despatch to Lord Stanley 

 dated in May, 1841, affirms this; for he says: 



. "In point of fact I have not been able to learn that any seizures have 

 been made when the vessels have not been within three miles of the 

 distance prescribed by the statute, or considered so to be, although it is 

 true that the Bay of Fundy, as well as smaller bays on the coast of this 

 province, is thought by the law officers in the province to form a part 

 of the exclusive jurisdiction of the crown." 



Besides, howhappens it that if the " King's most excellent Majesty, 

 by and with the advice and consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal 

 and Commons" in Parliament assembled, meant to exclude — and by 

 the act of 1819 actually did exclude, as far as the action of one govern- 

 ment could do so — our vessels from the bays now in dispute ; how hap- 

 pens it, I ask, that in 1841, twenty-one years afterwa,rds, the queries ol 

 Lord Falkland before us were submitted to the crown lawyers? On 

 the ground that Parliament had already construed the convention as his 

 Lordship desired that it should be interpreted, why did not the British 

 minister to whom these queries were transmitted so state in reply ? The 

 act of 1819 was the supreme law of the realm; and if the commanders 

 of the ships of the royal navy on the American station had been in- 

 structed year after year, and for twenty-one years, to execute it, and to 

 consider it as a construction of the convention in the sense tioio con- 

 tended for, why were every one of these commanders so very unfaith- 

 ful to their duty? Why was the fact that their orders from the admi- 

 ralty required them to hunt up and to drive out all American fishermen 

 from these bays unknown to everybody, in England and America? 



Three years previously (1838) Lord Glenelg, the Secretary for thp 

 Colonies, in a communication to Sir Colin Campbell, lieutenant governor 

 of Nova Scotia, in answer to a joint address to the Queen from the Le^ 

 gislatiye Council and House of Assembly ot that colony, complaining of 

 the habitual violation by American citizens of the convention of 1818, 

 promises that an armed force shall be kept, annually, on the fishing 

 grounds; and states that " her Majesty's minister at Washington had 

 been instructed to invite the friendly co-operation of the American gov- 

 ernment" to enforce a more strict observance of that convention. Here 

 was a very proper opportunity to refer to the provisions of the act of 

 ParUament of 1819, and to give our government Lord Glenelg's con- 

 structioD of it. But instead of this, he tehipers the expectataons of the 



