In this affair, the French government had energetically sustained, as 

 it had always done before, the interests of the fishermen. This constant 

 solicitude for their welfare appeared, with particular evidence, in the text 

 of a regulation signed by Choiseul December 24, 1772, in which the minister 

 defined the obligations of everyone "in case of shipwreck of a Newfoundland 

 vessel. " The last paragraph is thus construed: 



"if, after the fishing is completed, one or many vessels are wrecked, 

 and the greater part of the vessels have already left, and the ones remain- 

 ing cannot, without considerable loss, take care of the shipwrecked person- 

 nel, in this case his Majesty will assign a sum sufficient to provide for the 

 subsistence and the passage of his subjects to France, and indemnity for loss 

 of cod, oils and utensils that the captain is forced to abandon in order to make 

 room for the shipwrecked, as well as the additional barrels of water neces- 

 sary for sustenance; and this, on the sworn statement that the said captain 

 and officers will make in report and deposition to the Bureau as well as to 

 the Office of the Admiralty on their return to France. " 



Thus the minister provided direct recourse to the public treasury to 

 indemnify the fishermen in case of shipwreck, and loss of profit that they 

 had acquired at the price of extraordinary labor, for all that was not cover- 

 ed by the maritime insurance such as functioned in the 18th century. 



It happened that in these years when the French fishermen found them- 

 selves partially eliminated from a portion of the eastern part of the French 

 Shore, some immigrants of French origin settled on the west coast of New- 

 foundland, outside the limits then assigned. These were, for the most part, 

 Acadians dispersed by the very celebrated "grande derangement" of 17 54, 

 and which regrouped on shores neighboring the country to which they hoped 

 to return in better days. There was also, in the same neighborhood, Basques, 

 descendants of the residents of Plaisance who had emigrated to Cape Breton 

 following the treaty of Utrecht, and who, doomed henceforth there as else- 

 where to British domination, came back to settle in Newfoundland, in places 

 still free of occupants. 



These "French of the West Coast" settled on the shores of the penin- 

 sula of Port-a-Port and the Bay of St. George, along some 90 kilometers. 

 Their establishments in this region eased momentarily the thorny question 

 of the French Shore. 



42 



