The Story of Newfoundland | Page 4

had thundered in his best style that he would not surrender the Newfoundland fisheries though the enemy were masters of the Tower of London. So the great Bacon, at a time when the wealth of the Incas was being revealed to the dazzled eyes of the Old World, declared, with an admirable sense of proportion, that the fishing banks of Newfoundland were richer far than the mines of Mexico and Peru.
Along the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk the codfish is commonly caught with hook and line, and the same primitive method is still largely used by colonial fishermen. More elaborate contrivances are growing in favour, and will inevitably swell each year's returns. Nor is there cause to apprehend exhaustion in the supply. The ravages of man are as nothing to the ravages and exactions of marine nature, and both count for little in the immense populousness of the ocean. Fishing on a large scale is most effectively carried on by the Baltow system or one of its modifications. Each vessel carries thousands of fathoms of rope, baited and trailed at measured intervals. Thousands of hooks thus distributed over many miles, and the whole suitably moored. After a night's interval the catch is examined.
In 1890 a Fisheries Commission was established for the purpose of conducting the fisheries more efficiently than had been the case before. Modern methods were introduced, and the artificial propagation of cod and also of lobsters was begun. In 1898 a Department of Marine and Fisheries was set up, and with the minister in charge of it an advisory Fisheries Board was associated.
Though the cod-fishery is the largest and the most important of the Newfoundland fisheries, the seal, lobster, herring, whale and salmon fisheries are also considerable, and yield high returns. As to all these fisheries, the right to make regulations has been placed more effectively in the hands of Great Britain by the Hague arbitration award, which was published in September 1910, and which satisfied British claims to a very large extent.
A pathetic chapter in the history of colonization might be written upon the fate of native races. A great English authority on international law (Phillimore) has dealt with their claims to the proprietorship of American soil in a very summary way.
"The North American Indians," he says, "would have been entitled to have excluded the British fur-traders from their hunting-grounds; and not having done so, the latter must be considered as having been admitted to a joint occupation of the territory, and thus to have become invested with a similar right of excluding strangers from such portions of the country as their own industrial operations covered."
It is better to say frankly that the highest good of humanity required the dispossession of savages; and it is permissible to regret that the morals and humanity of the pioneers of civilization have not always been worthy of their errand.
It rarely happens that the native, as in South Africa, has shown sufficient tenacity and stamina to resist the tide of the white aggression: more often the invaders have gradually thinned their numbers. The Spanish adventurers worked to death the soft inhabitants of the American islands. Many perished by the sword, many in a species of national decline, the wonders of civilization, for good and for bad, working an obsession in their childish imaginations which in time reacted upon the physique of the race.
Sebastian Cabot has left a record of his standard of morality in dealing with the natives. When he was Grand Pilot of England it fell to his lot to give instructions to that brave Northern explorer, Sir Hugh Willoughby:
"The natives of strange countries," he advises, "are to be enticed aboard and made drunk with your beer and wine, for then you shall know the secrets of their hearts." A further practice which may have caused resentment in the minds of a sensitive people, was that of kidnapping the natives to be exhibited as specimens in Europe.
The natives of Newfoundland were known distinctively as Boeothics or Beothuks (a name probably meaning red men), who are supposed to have formed a branch of the great Algonquin tribe of North American Indians, a warlike race that occupied the north-eastern portion of the American continent. Cabot saw them dressed in skins like the ancient Britons, but painted with red ochre instead of blue woad. Cartier, the pioneer of Canadian adventure, who visited the island in 1534, speaks of their stature and their feather ornaments. Hayes says in one place: "In the south parts we found no inhabitants, which by all likelihood have abandoned these coasts, the same being so much frequented by Christians. But in the north are savages altogether harmless." Whitbourne, forty years later, gives the natives an equally good character: "These savage people being politikely and gently handled, much good might