The PANL collection provides detailed information on the physical organization of the mid-19th century French fishery in the harbours on the treaty coasts of Newfoundland. The detailed harbour charts locate the various numbered and named fishing rooms, which were in use in each harbour. The chart makers used symbols to indicate the use of the structures, such as wharves, outbuildings and stages as well as areas of rocky beach, which were also used for drying fish. These charts are potentially of great use to archaeologists, interested in locating the long since disappeared structures the French fishermen erected in the fishing harbours on the French Shore. In many of these harbours, the sites indicated on mid-19th century charts, were probably also fishing sites used by 18th century French fishermen.

The charts also provide evidence of growing knowledge on the part of the French naval hydrographers or chart makers of the physical and geological structure of the sea-bottom on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The types of bottom, such as sand or small rocks, were determined using a sounding-lead, a large cylindrical piece of lead, which had tallow (beef fat) in its hollow central cavity. The sounding-lead on a long sounding-line was dropped overboard at regular recorded intervals and whatever adhered to the tallow was recorded. Over a period of time, the French hydrographers were able to establish the exact limits and depths of the Banks and provide detailed information on the geological composition of the different types of sea-bottoms on the Banks. This was essential information for the France's Grand Banks fishing fleet as certain species of fish were known to prefer certain types of sea-bottoms or environments.

The French or Treaty Shore was that part of Newfoundland's coast on which the French had acquired treaty rights to prosecute a seasonal fishery, including the rights to land and dry their catch and the right to erect temporary structures. These rights were initially established under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the treaty by which France recognized England's sovereignty over Newfoundland. The French limits extended from Cape Bonavista to Point Riche on the West Coast. The Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ended France's land-based empire in Canada, reconfirmed the 1713 fishing rights on the Newfoundland coast and confirmed French possession of St. Pierre and Miquelon. The Treaty of Versailles in 1783 redefined the limits of the French Shore from Cape St. John to Cape Ray on the West Coast. The Anglo-French Treaty or French Shore Treaty of 1904 finally ended France's treaty-established rights on the sovereign territory of Newfoundland.

The origins of the French charts of Newfoundland and its coastal waters were practical: French fishermen needed reliable maps or charts which would guide them to the rich fishing grounds on the Grand Banks and to the French fishing harbours on the north-east and west coasts of Newfoundland.

An examination of the manuscript collections that form the French Navy's hydrographic record between 1713 and 1763, indicates that France made no great effort in mapping and evaluating the productive capacity of the various fishing harbours on the French Shore. After 1763 all this changed. The Newfoundland cod fishery was vital to French national interests: cod provided a relatively cheap source of protein and it created, for the French Navy, a reserve of men trained in the arts of sailing. After 1763, France, limited to the small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon and seasonal fishing, landing and drying rights on the west and north east coasts of Newfoundland, suddenly began to take a serious interest in its greatly reduced Canadian territory. The archival collections for the post-1763 period contain a number of detailed harbour surveys, which specifically calculated the productive capacity of each fishing room on the French Shore.

Over the course of the 18th century there were a number of maps of Newfoundland waters produced by the Dépôt des Cartes et Plans de la Marine, the French Navy's hydrographic department. Nicholas Bellin, the principal map-maker at the Dépôt, produced a series of atlases in large and small format, which contained a number of specific and general charts of Newfoundland waters. These surveys and others of the period were flawed because mariners did not possess instruments that would permit the accurate measurement of longitude. As a result, it was extremely difficult for mariners to accurately determine their geographic position. The ability to accurately determine longitude was one of the great achievements of 18th century science. In the 1760s, Captain James Cook, using the rapidly developing precision marine clocks needed to establish longitude, was finally able to produce an accurate map of Newfoundland, which he published in 1770.

By the 1780s, the French Navy was beginning to consider the necessity of producing new and more accurate surveys of Newfoundland waters for the large numbers of French fishing vessels, which formed part of the annual voyage to the Newfoundland banks or treaty shore fishery. In the 1early 1780s, the French hydrographers decided after a detailed examination that Captain Cook's 1770 chart of Newfoundland, that Cook's chart was longitudinally correct. Additional longitude modifications, based on Liberge de Granchain's work in Newfoundland in 1784, was incorporated into the Dépôt des Cartes et Plans de la Marine's 1784 Le Pilote de Terreneuve. This volume of eleven charts was based, in large part, on the published British naval surveys of Cook and Lane in 1760s and 1770s. These 1784 French charts, with few additions, formed the published body of French hydrographic charts which was available for fishermen and naval officers until almost the 1840s.

From 1792 until 1815 France was at war with England and prevented from accessing the cod fishery in Newfoundland. After their return to the coasts and banks of Newfoundland after the Napoleonic Wars, the French Navy played an increasing role in the monitoring and management of the French Shore fishery. As a consequence, the French Navy began a series of detailed harbour surveys. While most of the surveys between 1816 and 1827 were not published, they indicate the direction the French Navy intended to follow. In the 1840s, they began a new survey of all the French shore and over the course of the next 30 years would publish large and small-scale coastal charts for all of the French Shore and for all of the important fishing harbours. While the French Navy continued to publish charts of the French Shore until 1904, most of their work was done between roughly the period 1849 - 1865. The majority of these surveys were the work of Captain Georges Cloué, who produced over thirty of these published charts.

The French Navy's full production of the 112 charts for Newfoundland indicates a substantial and sustained government commitment of human and financial resources. Recent work by the PANL in a number of French archives has uncovered a wealth of manuscript documents, unpublished harbour surveys and the remainder of the published French charts for Newfoundland. The PANL is organizing the copying of all the French archival material related to the French Shore.