Development and Diplomacy: The Lobster Controversy on Newfoundland's French Shore, 1890–1904
The matter of French claims in Newfoundland probably caused more acrimony and outcry among the professionals and businessmen who dominated the Newfoundland legislature in the later nineteenth century than any other single issue. Most historians of the ‘French Shore problem’ have followed Fred Thompson's lead in analysing the history of the French shore by focusing on high-ranking diplomats and the colonial elite. They have also tended to view the conflict as involving primarily three groups: the French and British diplomatic corps and the Newfoundland mercantile and political elite. Using a well-known late nineteenth-century dispute over the lobster fishery as a case study, this paper reconsiders the history of the French Shore by drawing on reports about conditions on the Treaty Shore and on methodological and theoretical insights that have emerged since Thompson published his pioneering work in 1961. It argues that a wider array of groups exerted significant influence in how the controversy over lobster on Newfoundland's west coast in the late nineteenth century played out. Viewing the controversy from the perspective of these groups reveals the extent to which those outside of formal policy circles influenced the shape and viability of official agreements.
A Bay of Islands
Out from the shoreline of Brisbane lies a scattering of islands. Each particular, each with a feeling of its own, that in part comes from their topography. The mostly long, stretched sand islands that run along the outer edge of Moreton Bay keep the worst of the buffeting tides from the Coral Sea from the shorelines and inlets of those that lie inside the protection of their lean white flanks . These are the white-beached sand islands with impossibly high, blazingly alabaster dunes that in some parts stretch all the way from the east to the west, blown by the off-shore winds into forms that are sinuous and lithe. The are supported on a sub-structure of volcanic bedrock onto which countless tiny individual grains have been carried ashore by the strong offshore currents over 750,000 years. Others tell of different origins - that the sand islands are remnants of the hidden landscape of southeast Queensland that the post-glacial marine transgression submerged some 18,000 years ago, and which, Atlantis-like, re-emerged in more recent times.
One Hundred Years of Fishery Crises in Newfoundland
I WISH TO START BY THANKING THE University of New Brunswick for the honour bestowed upon me by inviting me to give this year's W. Stewart MacNutt Memorial Lecture. I am privileged indeed, and I come to you very much aware that I follow in the footsteps of David Alexander, my friend and mentor, and the author of the first of these lectures which was read at this podium, by a friend, after David's death in the summer of 1980. 1 am proud, and grateful, to be here today, i There are many things that can be done in a talk such as this. I have chosen not to present new research in any detail, but to reflect on what is going on in the Newfoundland fisheries right now, because I think we are facing the end of an era that stretches back over at least 100 years. It is time to assess what we have learned about that era in this context, and to identify what is central to it in the hope that we may then be better placed to think about where we go from here. The message will extend, too, to the rest of the Atlantic Canada fisheries, as we can see from the imposition of further moratoria recently. I have spent the last 25 years or so studying so-called marginal societies and socalled underdeveloped regions. For the bulk of that time I have worked with the fisheries of Atlantic Canada. In the past three years especially, I have been absorbed by (and shared in) the deep worry in Newfoundland over what will happen to our outports in the wake of the collapse of the groundfish stocks. I am reminded of what the diplomat Abba Eban once said, that "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives". I think we are there now: the alternatives have all been tried over the last 100 years. Perhaps wisdom will follow. Last March Memorial University's Institute of Social and Economic Research coordinated a conference sponsored by the provincial Department of Fisheries and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). It was called "Defining the Reality", and its purpose was to lay out the existing information on the groundfish crisis in order to have common ground for future planning. 2 It was one of the most painful experiences I have endured in my professional life. DFO biologists laid before us the dimensions of the crisis as they see it, and they tried to explain why they had not seen it coming. Dr. Leslie Harris spoke movingly of the Newfoundland fisher as tragic hero, complete with tragic flaw. Dr. Lee Alverson warned of global