The French Shore Fishermen
At least since 1504 the French were coming to Newfoundland to fish. For more than a hundred years they were the most active country in Newfoundland. As many as 20,000 French would come fishing every year. It was a very important source of food for France and France on occasion went to war with the British partly to defend their right to fish. In 1713 the treaty of Utrecht said that the French gave up the rights to Newfoundland and were not allowed to live there. But a large part of the Island (Including most of the Great Northern Peninsula and all of Pistolet Bay) the French were allowed to continue to fish. In a mostly successful effort to ensure that the French wouldn’t establish permanent settlements they were not allowed to stay over the winter. This area became known as the French Shore. Every summer dozens of French Fishing ships would come and fish on the French Shore. They set up fishing stations, build stages (Piers and wharves), build houses and everything was needed for living and fishing for seven months a year. By all accounts they were on good friendly terms with the local Indians (and at the tip of the Island friendly with the Eskimos who rowed over from Labrador for the summer). There are stories of them helping each other out and I haven’t found any stories of conflict.
One group however that they were not on friendly terms with were the English. And the English Fishermen were not happy campers. They had to sail along the French shore – some of the best fishing grounds in the world, go to Labrador which cost them time and money to go fishing in less fertile waters. The French every year had to spend weeks crossing the Atlantic while the English fishermen only had to sail from St Johns. As a result they sailed along the French fishing stations at a time of the year when they were vacant. English Fishermen would stop off at the French properties and steal anything of value. Any fishing flakes (Stands to dry fish) stages or piers would be damaged as much as possible, boats would have the axe taken to them and any buildings would be burned to the ground. The French would have to start over from scratch every year.
They did however come up with a solution. They hired English “Caretakers” to stay at the properties over the winter to look after the places. This also ment that they had workers to help them with the summer fishery. Babies got born by these caretaker families and eventually little outport communities formed around these French fishing stations. Most people today don’t know how their communities were started but a large portion (Possibly vast majority) of towns on the Northern Peninsula had their beginnings with the French Fishing stations. Up until very recently (When the owners retired) a fishing station in Cape Onion (Ship Cove) in Pistolet bay was being used as a B&B and you could stay they for the night (One of my ancestors used to own the place). Eventually many communities got big enough to have stores, churches and other buildings built and it became the outport towns that we know today. Many were un-viable and the government in the 1960s shut many small communities down and moved people to larger more accessible communities.
In 1904 the French fishermen stopped coming. The caretaker families for the most part simply kept living in the properties and basically owned the place. They had the nicest houses, everything needed for fishing and the best fishing spots. In many instances these people became the rich (In loose relative terms) people in the communities. They were often the community leaders and they were usually considered the wealthy families. These families were very often still considered the wealthy people in the communities until well after confederation.