1783-1815] Fishery dispute with Great Britain. 363 Paris, the people of the United States were to continue to enjoy, unmolested, the right to fish on the Grand Banks and on all the other banks of Newfoundland, in the Gulf of St Lawrence, and at all places in the sea where the inhabitants of both countries used to fish in colonial times. American fishermen might also take fish of every sort on such portions of the coast of Newfoundland as were free to British subjects, and on all other coasts and in all other harbours, bays, and creeks of His Majesty's dominions in America. But the only places where fish could be dried and cured were the unsettled shores of the harbours, bays, and creeks of Nova Scotia, the Magdalen Islands, and Labrador. From the signing of the treaty to the adoption of the Constitution the fishing industry steadily declined, till the average yearly earnings of each vessel were less than the annual cost. Under the Constitution. Congress came to the relief of the fishermen, and by bounties and annual allowances did much to revive the industry. The opening of the French West Indian ports in 1793 did more; and by 1800 British colonial fishermen were complaining that they were undersold by the Yankees. Unable to get help from the mother-country, the colonists took the matter into their own hands. In 1806 the Americans complained to Congress that their vessels were stopped, fired on, and searched ; that they were forced to pay toll as they passed through the Gut of Canso ; and, if they anchored in any bay, were made to pay light money and anchorage dues. From this competition the British were relieved by the "long embargo," the restrictive measures which followed, and by the war, which was hailed with delight by the fishermen of the Provinces. The war, they claimed, cancelled the Treaty of 1783. The liberty of fishing in British waters granted by that treaty was therefore a thing of the past ; and in a memorial drawn up at St John's, the mother-country was urged never again to suffer foreigners to fish in colonial waters. The Treaty of Ghent was silent on the matter of the fisheries. The colonists, therefore, believed that Americans were excluded ; and in the summer of 1815 the captain of a British ship of war seized some American vessels while fishing off the coast of Nova Scotia, and wrote across the enrolments and licenses of others the words, " Warned off the coast by His Majesty's ship Jaseur. Not to come within sixty miles." Complaint was made to the British government, which disavowed the act of the captain of the Jaseur ; but Lord Bathurst declared that after 1815 no American fishing vessel would be allowed to come within one marine league of the shores of His Majesty's North American possessions, nor be permitted to dry and cure fish in the unsettled ports of those territories. A long discussion on the character of the Treaty of Paris followed. John Quincy Adams, the American Minister, laid down the doctrine that the Treaty of 1783 was of a peculiar character and was not annulled by a state of war. The treaty acknowledged the independence of the United States, and defined its boundaries ; and, as these things
