The northern fishing ground had attracted European fishermen as early as the sixteenth century. By the time Jacques Cartier made his way through the Strait of Belle Isle in 1534, northern Newfoundland was already an established international zone. The cartography of the seventeenth century shows the outlines of the French fishery, a complex system of harbours centred upon Croc, in accordance with the rule of 1640 developed at the request of the armateurs of St. Malo. This rule not only named hospitable harbours but set forth the number of French fishermen to be accommodated in each of them, and it was further extended and elaborated by the mercantilist minister Colbert in the Ordonnance de la Marine of 1681. Even though France gave up the right to settle Newfoundland in 1713, its migratory fishery continued to flourish and reached its peak in the 1780s before it collapsed during the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.

To assist the recovery of the industry after the Treaty of Paris in1815, the French government granted bounties (primes) of fifty francs a man on the coasts and fifteen francs on the Grand Banks. As a result of this intervention, a census of 1828 shows over 9,000 men fishing on the northeast coast alone (Mannion, 248-9), and the total French fishing fleet in 1830 consisted of 300 to 400 vessels and 12,000 men (Innis, 218). French travel literature written at that time also records the existence of small pockets of English and Irish settlers who were able to maintain a feeble existence from year to year without the basic services of the colonial government. In summer, these individuals traded with French fishing crews in timber and bait; in winter, they undertook the protection of French boats and equipment (matériel).

Prior to 1713, English and French legislation allowed for French boats and equipment to be left behind and later claimed as personal property, and even though this practice was forbidden after 1713 it continued covertly. French boats, flakes and other structures were now left under the protection of British subjects who received sufficient payment in kind to allow them to eke out an existence by sealing and trapping. In 1828, for example, Eugène Ney reported from Croc, "Un Anglais, qui passe tous les hivers au Croc à garder nos cabanes, envoie au printemps de nombreuses fourrures à Saint-Jean" (Ney, 350). By the mid-nineteenth century, the French were building large boats in local harbours and housing them during the winter. Though they forcibly evicted some settlers from their designated harbours, an informal but illegal understanding had developed. Thus, when the commander of the French naval patrol was asked to report on the relationship in 1846, he observed that French fishing captains were counting on the services of trustworthy settlers but did not want to see their numbers increase.