Slide Show Title: Women in the Fishery.
 Images: 14
 Credit: PANL-CMCS
 Description:   Women played key roles in making fish from at least the late 1700s (and likely earlier). They were generally key members of the "shore crews" who worked at all stages of processing fish and at the many tasks involved. As fish moved further onto the land and away from the water (the domain of men), women became more and more central to its processing. In many locations around Newfoundland and Labrador, women organized and oversaw the making of fish.

  As Bennett March of Brownsdale, Trinity Bay commented: "My mother, she salted and she almost lived over on the flake." Women cut, gutted, headed, split and salted fish all over Newfoundland in many communities for generations. They also washed it out, lugged it up onto flakes and spread, piled, re-spread, re-piled, and were frequently the first to jump when rain or other forces (flies, too much sun, etc.) threatened fish spread on the flake. They trained their daughters and daughters-in-law in the techniques and methods of making fish, just as their husbands taught their sons to fish.

 Slide Show Title: On the Water - Inshore Fishing
 Techniques.
 Images: 16
 Credit: PANL
 Description: This slide show gives viewers a brief taste of the basic techniques employed in the inshore cod-fishery, particularly the cod trap, a gear type used in the Newfoundland inshore fishery for just over a century. In the future, PANL intends to mount an entire site dedicated to exploring the complexities of fish harvesting in Newfoundland waters.

Historically, hand lining for fish with baited hook was the dominant method of fishing for cod from the 1500s right up to the middle of the 19th century. Two or three men went onto the water (and also sometimes lone fishermen would fish single or "cross-handed") to fishing grounds near their communities (generally within a few hours sail or row). These grounds were very particular spots on the water (generally located on the edges of shoals) to which fish returned year after year at different times of the season and in different wind and tidal (current) conditions. Mooring on these places had to be extremely precise -- even a boat length or two out could make the difference between a full load or no load. To locate these grounds a system using "marks" was employed (a form of triangulation). When two different pairs of landmarks (for example, buildings, trees, tips of hills etc.,) were lined up one over the other from the water the fisherman knew he was over the spot on the ground where fish would take the bait. These "marks" had been worked out over generations of fishing and were passed down from one to the next (and often jealously guarded).

Once moored, the crew began fishing, each man with two, and sometimes three lines, in a different section or "room" of the boat. Different baits were employed at different times of the fishing season (as each type of bait made its appearance along the shore) -- herring in spring and late fall, caplin in summer and squid in the early fall.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the "trawl" (or "bultow") was introduced to Newfoundland fishermen, initially by the French fishermen on the French Shore of the island (the Northern Peninsula and West Coast). It too was basically a baited hook and line fishery, but one which fished many, many hooks by itself. A series of long strong lines (each one approximately 300 feet long) with short three foot "sud" lines evenly spaced at six foot intervals were carefully set along a fishing ground (again, usually the edges of a shoal), moored with weights and floats just above the sea floor. Each sud had a baited hook at its end, dangling over the sea floor. Trawl was hauled once or twice a day depending on how much of the gear was set and the time of year. A single haul of one 300 foot line could yield fifty fish and crews generally had many lines out at the one time. Trawls were the gear type of the offshore banking fishery up to its close in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Inshore fishermen also used trawl in many places around Newfoundland.

In the 1870s the Newfoundland cod trap was developed, reportedly by William Whitely of Bonne Esperance. Within a few short decades this powerful gear type was popular in many Labrador and Newfoundland fishing communities. The Newfoundland cod trap, constructed from nets, is basically a very large box with no top and a one-fathom wide doorway . Another long net, called a "leader," was run from the land or a shoal out through the doorway a short distance, "leading" fish into the trap. Traps could have perimeters up to eighty fathoms and be over ten fathoms deep. Such traps, if set well at the proper time of year, could catch tens of thousands of pounds of fish at a time. The cod trap season was very short and intense – coinciding with the arrival of spawning caplin in late June. Traps caught the huge schools of hungry cod-fish that chased this small smelt-like fish right into land from the offshore. As the caplin died off and fell back into deeper waters in late July and early August, the cod went off with them. Trap fishermen then moved on to the other methods -- trawls and hand-lines -- for the remainder of the season. 

 Slide Show Title: The Tools of the Trade.
 Images: 18
 Credit: PANL-The Newfoundland Museum
 Description: This slide show depicts a number of fisheries artifacts from the collections of the The Newfoundland Museum. Walter Peddle, Curator Emeritus of Material History at that institution, kindly provided us with access to an exhibit "diorama in progress" built for the recently mounted travelling exhibit called "Possessions." The exhibit deals with the objects of everyday life found on an average Newfoundland inshore fishing family's room. We of course focused on salt fisheries related items that might be found in a stage, store or boat: jiggers, barvels, grub buckets, and piggins. The range of artifacts found in this slide show represent but a fraction of the items that made up the tools and objects required on a day to day and a season to season basis on the Newfoundland fishing room. We hope our selection provides the viewer with a look at a few of the more critical and interesting items. Many of these are now most certainly `things of the past' and a good many are rare despite their original commonplaceness: the delicately carved salt shovel, the barvel, and the lowly fish mop. In fifty years few people will likely know what these and other items were even used for... 

 Slide Show Title: Ghost Outports.
 Images: 11
 Credit: PANL
 Description: Over the last 1000 years of European colonization and settlement, communities have come and gone all over Newfoundland and Labrador. Some of these places or `ghost outports' were abandoned on a voluntary basis. Local resource depletion, better opportunities elsewhere, catastrophes of weather, tsunami (gigantic wave triggered by undersea earthquake), fire, and war have all played a part in people relocating themselves and their communities through the centuries. The dramatic collapse of Newfoundland's cod stocks in the early 1990s is the latest, perhaps most catastrophic development that is hastening the exodus of thousands of Newfoundlanders (especially the young) out of the province's outports. This slide show highlights some of these ghost and near- ghost communities in Newfoundland and Labrador.

For centuries, people have been strongly encouraged and at times coerced to leave their communities. The ongoing wars of the 17th and 18th centuries between England and France uprooted fishing communities on a regular basis. In the last fifty years a remarkable shift has occurred in Newfoundland's and Labrador's settlement patterns. Prior to the 1960s, widely dispersed communities were necessary to conduct the small-boat salt fisheries that required i) shore room to dry fish and ii) nearby access to good fishing grounds. In post-Confederation Newfoundland (1949), a new economic model based on rationalization, industrialization, and centralization of the fisheries developed, leading to a massive dislocation across the Island and Labrador. 

To some extent this model was imposed by the Canadian and Newfoundland governments and commercial fishing interests. Three official "resettlement" programs were put into place between 1954 and 1975 to encourage the people of salt fishing communities to relocate to centralized "growth centres," where the new industrial-scale fish plants were built. One key rationale was that having fewer communities (which were linked by roads) would substantially reduce the costs of servicing the existing, widely dispersed communities spread around the coasts' coves, tickles, and islands. At times this "encouragement" took on a subtle coercive quality (and sometimes not so subtle) as services were withdrawn from the salt-fishing communities and pressure was applied to their inhabitants to relocate.  

In many cases, people were satisfied to move to new communities with more modern amenities (electricity, water and sewer, telephones, schools, hospitals, etc.) that were linked by roads to the rest of the island. Various sectors of the salt fish industry were depressed-largely due to long-standing neglect and mismanagement and the worldwide depression of the 1930s. The
communities that had prosecuted these fisheries had very little to offer to their young people, especially in relation to the many allurements of the mainland (American and Canadian bases of the WWII era had introduced Newfoundlanders to these). Added to this, governments and mercantile firms alike were pushing the modernization and rationalization of the fisheries.

Economic stagnation and despair were the net result and many of the young people of the salt fishing places lit out for "greener pastures" in Canada and elsewhere. This further undermined the ability of these small communities to carry on. Regardless of the impetus, when the process was over, 300 communities were abandoned and 30,000 people resettled, all the way from the South Coast of the Newfoundland to the North Coast of Labrador.

Many communities resisted these forces for change and relocation.  Southeast Bight, Monkstown, and Petit Forte in Placentia Bay and Fogo, Joe Batt's Arm, Tilting, Seldom-Come-By on Fogo Island are some examples of places that people would not vacate and continue to exist today. Likewise, small communities all around Newfoundland and Labrador fought (and continue to fight) for fish plants, new and/or better roads, etc., to ensure their continued survival. That these communities have survived is testimony to the fact that they had and have much to recommend them: they are viable, stable, close-knit places. 

There were other reasons for the abandonment of places in Newfoundland. Towns centred around exhaustible and limited resources like timber or minerals (and, in fact, the fisheries of the last ten years) were often abandoned upon depletion of the resource. Areas such as Lomond on the West Coast and Tilt Cove in Notre Dame Bay are prime examples of areas where communities have either disappeared or all but disappeared upon the exhaustion of the primary resource. Other Newfoundland mining communities have suffered similar fates: Bell Island, Baie Verte and Buchans are all examples of communities battling to maintain themselves since the closure of their mines. 

Natural disasters were frequently responsible for people relocating. La Manche on the Southern Shore is a good example. It was very open to the northwest Atlantic, a fact that, along with its extreme landscape, might explain its late settlement in the 1840s. In early 1966 it was abandoned after a huge storm swept its wharves and stages and bridge away.

Finally, some of Newfoundland's salt-fish communities did not disappear, but have changed so much they are no longer recognizable. Logy Bay, Outer Cove, and Middle Cove which were small fishing communities just northeast of St. John's have lost most of their salt fishing character and been transformed into suburban areas with some agricultural activity.