Approval was generously given by Ms. Rosemary E. Ommer to post the following lecture to the LeDrewHome website. It presents us with a clear vision of our Jersey ancestry as part of the cod fisheries, and their settlement in Newfoundland, and coincides very well with our ancestor Mary LaDros clearing her land in Cupids in 1762, presumably with her husband Mr. LeDros, per the Cupids Plantation Map of 1805. Posted by: Sandra J. LeDrew, March 11, 2005

THE JERSEYMEN IN NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE MARITIMES

Lecture given to the Newfoundland Historical Society St. John’s By Rosemary E. Ommer, Department of History, April 21, 1983

 This paper, read at the AGM of the Newfoundland Historical Society, April 21, 1983, dealt with the inter-dependence that existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the British North American cod fisheries and the Island of Jersey.

Jersey, a tiny island only forty-five square miles in area, was not capable of supporting an expanding population indefinitely on a domestic economy rooted in agriculture. By 1624, with the island’s population at 25,000 souls, a knitting industry was being supported with wool imports from England, and enclosures were underway for apple orchards designed to promote cider production. Supporters of Charles II during the Civil War, the island’s seigneurs (especially the DeCarteret family) were rewarded with lands in the Bahamas, Carolines and New Jersey after the Restoration: but these gifts do not seem to have been used by the Jersey seigneurs to create a transatlantic economy. Instead, merchant interest in the Newfoundland fisheries grew slowly until by 1770 the island had 45 vessels going annually across the Atlantic.

Jerseymen seem to have fished in Trinity Bay from about 1670, but not until the 1730’s were they well established in Conception Bay. Their real expansion in the New World fisheries took place after 1763 when, with the Treaty of Paris, the whole coast of mainland British North America became accessible to the English fishery at large. Here at last, Jerseymen had an advantage over the West Country ports, since there had been a tradition of French-speaking Jerseymen crewing for the St. Malouin fishery from the early sixteenth century onwards. They were familiar with good land bases and fishing grounds in the newly-opened Gulf of St. Lawrence. Shortly after 1763, Jerseymen were to be found in Gaspe (Robin, Pipon and Company; Janvrin and Company; Fiott and Company) as well as in Conception Bay where one third “of the 34 sail of shipping in ….1763” were Jerseymen. By 1830 the principal centre of Jersey fishing operations was in the Baie des Chaleurs where Charles Robin and Company (C.R.C) had eleven establishments. There were 517 Jerseymen in establishments in the Gulf, compared to 25 in New Brunswick, 298 in Labrador and 255 in Newfoundland according to a Jersey magazine of that time.

The Trade (one year of which was dealt with in detail from C.R.C.’s Letterbooks) required both rigorous organization and a flexible production structure in order to respond to an essentially non-rigorous biological resource and volatile markets. The never centre of the fish merchant system remained Jersey itself. There, some of the supplies for the fishery were manufactured or assembled, the exchange goods bought with fish (rum, molasses, sugar, mahogany, etc.) were returned, labour was recruited in the form of clerks, agents, captains, shore crews and fishermen. The vessels returned to Jersey when all was done; it was home: the metropole, master-minding its New World outposts, deploying the capital that created the trade, and (most importantly) receiving the profits that flowed therefrom. That was, after all, the purpose of the fishery from Jersey’s point of view. From her fisheries, Jersey gained an economic ‘engine for growth’ which fired her manufacturing enterprises and her shipbuilding, and gave her an entry into the international carrying trades and the wealthy commerce of the British Empire.

After 1850, however, this merchant system began to falter. In 1852 the protectionist duties on sugar were repealed and Jersey cod markets in the British West Indies were rendered unstable. By 1860, with Gaspe a free port, the truck system in the area was threatened by traders who could now enter Gaspe and offer ‘cash on the barrel-head’ for local fish. At the same time the building of roads, a rising population, and the growth of agriculture and timber in Gaspe, began to provide and require alternative occupations for Gaspe fishermen. After 1863 duties imposed on goods into Labrador further weakened the profit margin of Jersey fish merchants. The battle between sail and steam in the carrying trades began to hurt Jersey shipbuilding, especially after 1865.

By 1867 Jersey merchants were complaining of the “unremunerating character of the Newfoundland trade” and ship building had declined seriously. In 1873 the Jersey Merchantile Union Bank collapsed, followed by the Joint Stock Bank, and deQuetteville of Labrador failed that year. In 1886 the final blow fell with the collapse of the Jersey Banking company which took with it the remaining large fishing companies of Jersey, including C.R.C. and Le Boutillier Freres. It was the end of an era.

The story of Jersey’s involvement in the Newfoundland and Gulf of St. Lawrence cod fisheries is a cameo of merchant capitalism in New World staple trades. It demonstrates the capacity for small states to engender economic development and also their fragility in the face of larger international political and technological change. It points up the relationship between trade and empire, and it underlines the interdependence that existed between Old World metropoles and their New World Colonies.

The following biography was obtained from the “Coasts under Stress” web site at: http://www.coastsunderstress.ca/home.php :

Rosemary E. Ommer was recently appointed as the Director of Special Projects at the University of Victoria. Prior to this she was the Director of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. She holds her Ph.D. in economic historical geography from McGill University, an MA in historical geography from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and she has researched and taught in Atlantic Canada since the early 1970s. An economic historian and professor of history at Memorial from 1982 until 1999, she also held the position of Research Director of Memorial's Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) from 1990-1996. While at ISER, she became the Principal Investigator on the Tri-Council Eco-Research project "Sustainability in a Cold-Ocean Coastal Environment" which successfully completed in 1999. She also undertook to be a partner in the SSHRC-funded "Ethics as a Basis for Policy Decision-Making in Fisheries Management" project which was co-directed by Harold Coward at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, Tony Pitcher, Director of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Cenre and herself. During 1998-99 she was on leave from Memorial, working at the University of Victoria as their SSHRC "research facilitator" and teaching in the Department of Economics. She is the author and/or editor of several books including, most recently, Fishing Places, Fishing People: Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries, an interdisciplinary look at fisheries in Canada which she co-edited with Dianne Newell, University of British Columbia and which was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1999.