In the final years before Confederation, New Brunswick was at the centre of a worldwide industry, where specific parts of the province specialized in particular types of fishing, which was in high demand all over the world.
In the Bay of Fundy, the West Isles was one hotspot of fishing at the time, particularly Grand Manan, named Munanook in Peskotomuhkati. There, people would fish for pollack, hake, haddock, mackerel, but most of all cod.
It seems New Brunswickers weren’t especially fond of cod themselves – except for cod tongues, which when pickled were an extraordinarily popular delicacy.
Americans, however, couldn’t get enough cod. Fundy cod were known for their large size, weighing up to 80lbs. The 1857 “Handbook of New-Brunswick” claimed Fundy cod was “always selected for the finest tables in America.”
Cod was fished all year around. Fundy fishermen used 12 foot long small boats with a single sail, carrying a lone fisherman.
In 1850 Moses Perley travelled to Grand Manan to write a report on the island’s fishing industry. When he asked the fishermen why they didn’t build bigger boats, he was told that “such boats would not do. The boats had to be hauled up above the tide in stormy weather or they would be quickly dashed to pieces.”
Fishermen set sail at dawn, returning at dusk. All fishing in the Bay of Fundy was done with a line and a hook back then.
Cod would then be split, salted, and dried in the sun for six to eight days. In wetter seasons, when it wasn’t possible to dry the cod, they were salted and picked, and packed in barrels.
Moses Perley described hake fishing at Cameron’s Cove, saying it was done at night, attracting the fish with lit torches. “At day-break the fishing boats return to the shore [and] the fish are thrown out on the beach with a pitchfork. Soon after sunrise the newly caught hake were … lying on the gravel beach, sweltering under the heat. The fishermen set up pieces of board upon the open beach, on which the fish were split.” The fish were then pitchforked onto a scale, then pitchforked onto wheelbarrows, “and then carried off to the pickling casks.”
Perley noted that the fishermen pickled the hake “of exceeding strength … rendering them as salty as possible.” This made them weigh more.
Grand Manan’s fishermen told him that the buyers from the mainland bought fish by weight. They explained: “it was useless for any one person to cure his fish better than his neighbour, as he would obtain no better prices … the price was so low it afforded no remuneration for
additional labour or greater care.”
Cod liver oil was a very valuable export, which was refined and sold at high prices for medicinal purposes. The cod heads were used as fertilizer in farmers fields.
Meanwhile, on the mainland, salmon was the most valuable fish, commanding the relatively high price of sixpence sterling per pound at the Saint John market.
In 1857 some 40,000 salmon were caught in the Saint John River alone. They were packed in ice and shipped to America where fresh salmon could be sold for an astronomical profit.
In the Miramichi salmon fishing was an enormous industry, where a staggering 400,000 lbs of salmon was caught in a single season. Miramichi was an early adopter of that world-changing invention that is the tin can, and exported vast amounts of canned salmon overseas to Britain.
Meanwhile, up on the North Shore, in towns like Shippigan, Miscou, and Restigouche, fishing was also a big industry. Cod was once again the most valuable catch, but everything about it was different up there.
Fishermen there had to travel further to catch cod. They would make two day long trips, sleeping overnight on their boats. They would depart early in the morning of the first day, and return the evening of the second day.
The boats in the Bay de Chaleur were bigger than the boats in the Bay of Fundy, with two fore and aft sails and a jib. They did not, however, have a deck, so their crews –usually two men and a boy– would sleep out in the open.
The fishermen would build their boats themselves in the winters. The boats usually had birch keels, cedar timbers, and pine planks. They carried oars, an anchor, rope, a compass, and a little oven for cooking. It would cost about 18 New Brunswick pounds to build and outfit a boat, which would last six to eight years.
Unlike in the Bay of Fundy, where fishermen sold their catch to large industrial scale processing plants, the North Shore fishermen would generally split, salt, drain, pack and sell their fish themselves, with the help of their large families and community.
The Bay de Chaleur cod themselves were actually quite different from the Bay of Fundy cod. They were much smaller, and their flesh was a beautiful bright white colour which was highly prized in Mediterranean cooking.
A peculiarity of the Chaleur cod is that their flesh is somewhat drier than Fundy cod, meaning it was better for shipping vast distances, including across the Atlantic, and even to South America.
To not allow the South American humidity to spoil their cod, Chaleur fishermen devised a unique shipping method of using drums in which the fish is pressed in tightly with a powerful screw. This very unusual packaging led to Mediterranean Europeans being better able to easily identify Chaleur cod, which doubled as an accidental marketing tool there for the extremely popular fish.
However, despite all their hard work, fishermen often lived in poverty.
A system called “salarié” or “truck system” meant they got paid in credits at shops owned by the merchants who bought their fish. Those credits could only be redeemed at that store. Often the only hard cash fishermen saw was enough to pay taxes and church tithes. No matter how much fish they caught each season, this exploitative system ensured that they always were in debt to the merchants.
