Friday, and can prove by a hundred incidents how infallible are the signs and omens which he believes in. He thinks to die in his bed. True it is, that he has been overset; that his boat, loaded with fish to the "gunnel," has sunk under him, and that a vessel has run over him; but he is still alive, and was not born to be drowned." His "fish stories" are without end. In politics, he goes for the largest liberty. He has never heard of easements and prescriptive rights; but he occupies at will both beach and upland, without any claim to either, and will browbeat the actual proprieter who has the temerity to remind him of their relative positions. Against speculators he wages perpetual war: why should he not? since it is they who put up the price of his favorite flat-hooped, fine middlings flour," and put down the price of fish and "ile!"

And who shall do justice to his dress and to his professional gear? The garments which cover his upper and nether man he calls his ile sute. The queer-shaped thing worn upon his crown is a sou'-wester; if the humor takes him, a north-easter. He wears neither mittens nor gloves, but has a substitute which he has named nippers.

or,

When he talks about brush, he means to speak of the matted and tangled mass which grows upon his head; or the long, red hair under his chin, which serves the purpose of a neckcloth; or of that in front of his ears, which renders him impervious to the dun of his merchant. His boots are stampers. Lest he should lose the movables about his person, he has them fastened to his pockets by lannairds. One of his knives is a cut-throat, and another is a splitter. His apron, of leather or canvass, is a barvel. The compartment of his boat into which he throws his fish as he catches them, is a kid. The state of the moon favorable for "driving herring," he calls darks. The bent-up iron hook which he uses to carry his burning torch on the herring-ground, is a dragon. The small net with an iron bow and wooden handle, is a dip-net, because it is with that that he dips out of the water the fish which his light attracts to the surface. His set-net is differently hung, and much larger; it has leads on its lower edge to sink it with in the water, and corks upon its upper edge, at regular intervals, to buoy it up and preserve it nearly in a perpendicular direction, so that the herrings may strike it and become entangled in its meshes.

Nor ends his dialect here. Chebacco-boats and small schooners are known to him as pinkies, pogies, and jiggers. He knows but little about the hours of the day and night; everything with him is reckoned by the tide. Thus, if you ask him what time he was married, he will answer, "On the young flood last night;" and he will tell you that he saw a certain man this morning about "low-water slack;" or, as the case may be, just at half-flood," "as the tide turned," or "two hours to low water." If he speaks of the length of line required on the different fishing-grounds, he will compute by "shots;" and by a shot he means thirty fathoms. If he have fish to sell, and is questioned as to their size, he will reply that they are "two-quintal" fish, by which he means that fifty will weigh one hundred and twelve pounds.

He is kind and hospitable in his way; and the visitor who is treated to fresh smother, duff, and jo-floggers,* may regard himself as a decided favorite. He believes in witches and in dreams. The famous pirate

* Potpie of sea-birds, pudding, and pancakes-the fisherman's three P.'s

1832. 1833..

1834.

Places.

Kyd buried gold and treasures in Money Cove,* Grand Menan, he is sure; and he has dug for it many a time. His "woman" is the "best;" the harbor he lives in is "the safest;" and his boat is "the fastest and will carry sail the longest." When determined upon going home, whether he is upon the land or the sea, he says, "Well, I'll up killock and be off."

The man I have described is no countryman of ours, and was to be seen playing the soldier on the easterly side of the St. Croix during the recent very wordy but bloodless war on the Aroostook, which was terminated by the treaty of Washington. But some of his qualities of character, and forms of speech, are common to most of the class to which he belongs; and the nets, knives, and other gear, are in general

use.

Statistics of the fisheries of the Bay of Fundy for the year 1850.

Statistics of the fisheries of New Brunswick-value of produce exported.

92909°-S. Doc. 870, 61-3, vol 3—37

* So called from the popular belief that Captain Kyd buried two hogsheads of treasure there.

Statistics of the fisheries of New Brunswick-various produce, and quantities of each,

From 1620 until the union with Massachusetts by the charter of William and Mary, 1692.

ISLES OF SHOALS.

From 1614 to the Revolutionary Controversy.

MASSACHUSETTS.

From 1614 to the Revolutionary Controversy.

NEW ENGLAND.

From the commencement of the Revolutionary Controversy to the Declaration of Independence.

*

THE UNITED STATES.

From the Declaration of Independence to the year 1852.

THE MACKEREL FISHERY.

From the settlement of New England to the year 1852.

THE HERRING FISHERY.

From its commencement to the year 1852.

THE HALIBUT FISHERY.

PART IV.-HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE CONTROVERSY AS TO THE INTENT AND MEANING OF THE FIRST ARTICLE OF THE CONVENTION OF 1818.

The documents submitted by the President, in answer to the resolution of the Senate of July 23, 1852, embracing as they do the able and spirited defence of our rights, by Mr. Everett, never before published, as well as several other papers of interest, afford much valuable information. But yet, it is apparent that our archives are singularly deficient in documentary evidence to show both sides of the controversy as it really exists. We have already seen that the loyalists, or "tories," opposed any stipulations whatever, at the peace of 1783, and we are now to find that the principal cause of our difficulties since that

time-whether past or present-on the question of the fisheries, is to be traced to the same source.

At the close of the Revolution, justice and good policy both required of our fathers a general amnesty, and the revocation of the laws of disability and banishment; so that all adherents of the crown who desired, might become American citizens. Instead of this, however, the State legislatures, generally, continued in a course of hostile action, and treated the conscientious and the pure, and the unprincipled and corrupt, with the same indiscrimination as they had done during the struggle. The tories were ruined and humble men. Most of them would have easily fallen into respect for the new state of things, old friendships and intimacies would have been revived, and long before this time all would have mingled in one mass; but in some parts of the United States there seems to have been a determination to drive them from the country at all hazards, as men undeserving of human sympathy. Eventually, popular indignation diminished; the statutebook was divested of its most objectionable enactments, and numbers were permitted to occupy their old homes, and to recover the whole or a part of their property; but by far the greater part of the loyalists, who quitted the thirteen States at the commencement of or during the war, never returned; and of the many thousands who abandoned their native land at the peace, and while these enactments were in force, few, comparatively, had the wish, or even the means, to revisit the country from which they were expelled. It cannot be denied, and we of this generation should admit, that our fathers dealt harshly with many, and unjustly with some, of their opponents. Indeed, whoever visits the British colonies will be convinced that persons were doomed to misery who were as true in heart and hope as was Washington himself; that, in the divisions of families which everywhere occurred, and which formed one of the most distressing circumstances of the conflict, there were wives and daughters who, although bound to loyalists by the holiest ties, had given their sympathies to the whigs from the beginning, and who, in the triumph of the cause which had had their prayers, went meekly- -as woman ever meets a sorrowful lot--into hopeless, interminable exile. It is to be lamented that better counsels did not prevail. Had New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia especially, been either merciful or just, transactions which, in ages to come, will be very likely to put us on our defence, would not stain our annals. The example of South Carolina should have been followed by all. As it was, whigs whose gallantry in the field, whose prudence in the cabinet, and whose exertions in diplomatic stations abroad, had contributed essentially to the success of the conflict, were regarded with enmity on account of their attempts to produce a better state of feeling and more humane legislation.

As a matter of expediency, how unwise was it to continue to perpetuate the opponents of the Revolution, and to keep them a distinct class, for a time, and for harm yet unknown! How ill-judged the measures that caused them to settle the hitherto neglected possessions of the British crown! Nova Scotia had been won and lost, and lost and won, in the wars between France and England, and the blood of New England had been poured upon its soil like water; but when we drove thousands and tens of thousands of our countrymen to seek a refuge there, what was it? Before the war, the fisheries of its coastfor the prosecution of which Halifax itself was founded-comprised, in