Destination: St Pierre et Miquelon (part two)

Painting made for the 1900 Exposition Universelle of Paris

Excursion to the Ile des Marins (Fishermen’s Island)

As I related in my last post we arrived in St Pierre and took a tour of the island (see both posts of 21-August and 17-August-09.) From our hotel window we could see another island with just a few isolated houses. We were told that this was the Ile des Marins (Fishermen’s Island). Nobody lives there anymore (just a couple of people in the summer.) It has been preserved as a “museum island.” We decided to take the afternoon boat going there.


In Jacques Leclerc’s map below you can see the tiny Ile aux Marins to the right of Ile St Pierre, in the bottom of the map. Newfoundland is on the right; in French it is called Terre Neuve, which means New land.


This island used to be called Ile aux Chiens (Dogs’ Island) after the small shark called Dog Fish. The island’s name was changed in 1920. Up to 800 people lived on this island; all of them independent fishermen and their families. They were mostly French from Normandy and Brittany, Basques and Acadiens fishing with their dorys.

Below is a painting depicting the island in its heyday.


Because the island is covered with flat shoreline stones (called “Grave” in French) it was perfect for drying cod. I bought a book of poetry by Francine Girardin-Langlois which is illustrated. Here is her painting of the women drying the cod on the “graves.” It looks like backbreaking work.

Below is a vintage postcard showing more cod being laid on the flat rocks or “graves” to dry. Young men (often orphan teenagers) called “Graviers” would come from France for the season to help cure the cod. In 1904 St Pierre et Miquelon lost the privilege to fish the waters of the “French Shore” of Newfoundland. This was the beginning of the decline for the little Ile des Marins. When in 1930 the fish drying plant burned down, the resident started to leave the island. In 1963 the school closed and the last full time resident left in 1964. The local authorities decided to preserve the church and a few houses as a “village of bygone days” to show future generation how cod was preserved and also to show the hard life these fishermen led on this island. Some of the houses are second holiday homes for descendants of the original fishermen, but with no electricity or running water.


It was a perfect day, sunny, not too warm with a light breeze. We walked toward the museum and visited it.


It has a collection of objects, furniture, memorabilia and pictures from the glory years of the cod fishery.

(Click on the pictures to enlarge them)

This is the one room school house with the same type of furniture we had in our primary schools in France when I was a little girl. (Click on the pictures to enlarge them.)


On the blackboard someone had described what the teacher wrote that last day of school : “Friday 5 July 1963… The Last Class So he turned towards the blackboard took a piece of chalk and, pressing with all his strength, he wrote as big as he could: “Vive la France” then he stood there, his head leaning against the wall, without talking, with his hand he gestured “that’s the end …go away.”


We followed the path to the church. This church called Notre-Dame des Marins (Our Lady of the Fishermen) was built in 1874 from trees imported from France since there are no trees on the island. The church is built in the shape of a fishing boat and has two Italian chandeliers.


We walked to the lighthouse


and then towards what is left of a German cargo ship the “Transpacific” which sank in 1971

Don't forget to click on the pictures to enlarge them

We proceeded to walk all around the island from the lighthouse all the way to the cannons (placed there after the Crimean war), stopping sometimes to watch the spare landscape or St Pierre across the bay. We could not but think about the devastation overfishing did to the cod fisheries. In 1492 John Cabot marveled that cod was so plentiful that it almost stopped his ship, or at least slowed its progress. The sea seemed alive with fish. This went on for centuries with cod fishing sustaining both fishermen as well as the general economy of the area.

This is an Old Cod Fishing print published by Giulio Ferrario in Milan, 1827
Fishermen from France and Portugal would come in their small inshore boats and the cod was so plentiful that it was enough for their small-scale fishing and for the millions of harp seals. The natural growth of the cod stock could replenish itself then.

Fishermen fishing cod in their inshore boats in the 1920s

But in the mid 50s and 60s the dory fishery was displaced by large factory trawlers. These huge trawlers came from distant countries attracted by quick financial gains. They had huge nets which could haul enormous quantities of fish, process them and deep-freeze them quickly working around the clock. Just think - a typical 16th century ship could catch 100 tons of fish in a season – these huge factory trawlers could catch 200 tons of cod in an hour!

The designs of the trawlers were improved and equipped with stronger radars so they could catch the cod anywhere until the catch increased to 800,000 tons in 1968. But then, the catch kept falling so in 1976 the Canadian government passed legislation to extend their jurisdiction further from the coast. The international fishing fleets had to now fish in the “high seas”. This could have helped the cod stock but now it was the Canadian government, with investors, which started a fishing fleet of bigger factory-trawlers combing (actually vacuuming) the sea until 90% of the cod were gone. In 1992 the Canadian government was forced to close the fishery. This devastated Newfoundland where 40,000 lost their work as well as did the small-boat fishermen of St Pierre et Miquelon who fished this area for generations. Greed and ignorance caused the seemingly limitless stocks of cod to dwindle to near extinction. Technological advances now allow the potential for large-scale trawlers to find and annihilate every commercial fish stock anywhere in the world. I heard that in Alaska, King Salmon stocks are not as plentiful as they once were. But with the constant search for profits plus the exploding worldwide population more fish industries will certainly collapse.

Split and salted cod drying in 1920’s picture


Fishing in the area for capelins and plankton-feeding shrimp further depletes the ecosystem of the ocean and deprives the cod of their usual nourishment - so they are starving. Everything is connected. The destruction caused by grossly over fishing cod in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland is an enormous ecological disaster.

So we left the little island and took the 10-minute boat ride back to St Pierre feeling nostalgic and a bit sad. Here is a Grand Banks folk song:

Wasn't many years ago, that the men round here would go
Out in their skiffs and haul their traps out on the bay
And shortly they would return, loaded down from stem to stern
And weigh off the fish, and store the gear away.
And now the waters are as barren as the cliffs that guard the cove,
And catch the North wind blowing off the shore.
And I wonder how an ocean turns as lifeless as a stone
And I wonder can the sea revive once more

Paintings by Jean Claireaux