The Story of Newfoundland | Page 4

whole weight of the fish--commonly contains as
many as five millions of ova. In the year 1912-13 the value of the
exported dried codfish alone was 7,987,389 dollars, and in 1917 the
total output of the bank and shore cod fishery was valued at 13,680,000
dollars; and at a time when it was incomparably less, Pitt 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