Dark Harbour sits on the western coast of Grand Manan Island, at the entrance of the Bay of Fundy, in the south-western corner of the province of New Brunswick. Since the nineteenth century, this small and unique fishing village has provided a safe harbour to fishers with its distinct geography, including 100-metre-high cliffs and a natural seawall enclosing the pond-like harbour. After 1846, with the opening of the seawall to allow boats to pass, Dark Harbour became an important site for the herring fishery on Grand Manan. Early residents developed the pond and its shores into a place to take and dry catch, built smoke sheds for processing herring, and milled lumber from timber floated down the river that fed the pond. By 1900, the seasonal population of the community had grown to about 200 people, living and working on the pond and seawall. In the early twentieth century, Dark Harbour also emerged as the dulse capital of the world, an industry likewise made possible by its unique geography and the Fundy tides.
Dulse (Palmaria palmata), is an edible seaweed recognizable for its reddish colour, salty yet pleasantly peculiar taste, and course texture. It is picked by hand at low tide and dried over rocks in the sun for up to three days. This process of gathering and preparing the popular snack for human consumption has remained largely the same for well over a century. In that time, dulse has become part of a culinary experience and culture in the Maritimes, especially in those parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia where the high and low tides of the Bay of Fundy provide a fertile garden to sea vegetables. Today it is available at most weekly markets, roadside produce stands in coastal towns, on lucky occasions at Sobeys, and even shipped around the world.
As a commercial crop, dulse has been picked and shipped to be sold within New Brunswick by local grocers and wholesalers since at least the 1850s. India House in Woodstock, N.B., roughly one hundred kilometres from the coast, was one of the earliest to include dulse in their newspaper advertisements, among other goods and merchandise for sale. Their ads first ran in the Carleton Sentinel in November of 1853 and continued in most issues of that paper for the next two decades.1 Once it reached store shelves, dulse became a regular part of the diet of many New Brunswickers, just as it had been for the fishers who picked and dried it. The consumption of dulse was not limited to any one specific class or group of people as the seaweed also appeared on buffet tables at refined social events. For example, in 1877, following an evening of speeches, readings, recitations, and music at the Crystal Tide Lodge in Saint John, “Baskets were opened and everything nice in the eatable line was brought forth in abundance.” Later, guests were served a dulse “specialty” to mark the end of the evening.2 In small towns and urban centres, and from fishing boats to kitchen and banquet tables, dulse was a regular part of life in New Brunswick during the nineteenth century.
This sea savoury was also a special favourite of children. John Elliott and Eddie Walsh of Saint John, described as “young lads” in the city’s Evening Times, were accused by a Mrs. Sinclair of stealing money, candies, and dulse from her shop in May 1905. According to Mrs. Sinclair, Elliot “called her an old hag, telling her she might have got her money back” and then made off with “four or five peppermint lozenges, and Walsh had helped himself to a small piece of dulse.” The boys were both made to testify before a judge, admitting that they took candies and dulse but not money, while several witnesses offered no proof that condemned them of anything other than shoplifting confectionaries. When the judge dismissed the case, he attached no importance to the candy or dulse, facetiously pointing out that “if such charges were always brought to court he might be in Dorchester [Prison] himself. It was common for St. John people to help themselves to other people’s dulse.”3
Although the judge ascribed no legal significance to the theft of dulse, and luckily so for young Elliot and Walsh, that did not mean there was no value or money to be made in its sale. At the turn of the century, dulse sold in stores for between ten and fifteen cents a pound according to advertisements placed in Fredericton’s Daily Herald.4
In 1897, the Miramichi Advance reported that dulse was “gathered on the shores of Grand Manan principally.”5 All along the island’s coasts, dulse was typically collected and sold by fishers as a secondary trade when the herring were few or when the season closed during the summer. But at Dark Harbour, the combination of high cliffs, cold water, and low tides provided especially advantageous conditions for the cultivation of seaweed. Palmaria palmata grows throughout the cool sub-arctic waters that fill the Bay of Fundy but thrives in lower light such as at Dark Harbour where the cliffs prevent direct sunlight from reaching the pond and shore until late morning.
The proliferation of dulse on Grand Manan, and at Dark Harbour, did not go unnoticed and caught the attention of would-be entrepreneurs following the end of the First World War. Writing to the New Brunswick Minister of Lands and Mines in 1926, Milton Fowler Gregg, a Canadian military officer and recipient of the Victoria Cross, recommended the expansion of the dulse trade into a full-blown industry. According to Gregg, “Dulse has been picked and sold locally to a very limited degree for a great many years,” but the formation of “a company to carry out the most comprehensive study of the best means for preparing in air-sealed packets, marketing, and distributing this commodity upon a comparatively larger scale” would provide solid employment to a considerable number of people.6 Such a scheme required a substantial investment of capital to make arrangements with dulse pickers “without the feeling that some outside organization would step in and pick the raw materials and take advantage of the market.” Gregg proposed the creation of a Maritime Dulse Company and requested that it be granted exclusive dulse-picking rights along the foreshore of the entirety of New Brunswick’s Fundy coast, including the islands, creating a dulse monopoly in the province.
Gregg’s proposition was forwarded to the provincial Department of Marine and Fisheries, and an Inspector of the Fisheries was commissioned to undertake a review of commercial dulse harvesting. The inspector reported that roughly one hundred people were engaged in the industry, “most of that around the north side of Grand Manan Island,” at Dark Harbour. The season began in late June and was carried out until the middle of September, corresponding with the herring fishing season. Outputs from the previous year were substantial at “about 28,000 pounds, with a value of some $3,420.”7 A further report on amounts and marketed value of dulse between 1910 and 1925 was prepared by the Department and showed that Grand Manan not only produced tens of thousands of pounds of dulse per year, but also regularly outpaced amounts gathered in either Digby or Annapolis in Nova Scotia. However, the amounts of dulse gathered year over year were wildly inconsistent while the value of the seaweed fluctuated significantly between $4 and $21 per 100lbs in the span of just fifteen years.8
The report of the Fisheries Inspector attributed the variations in output to the weather, noting that “some simple method of drying under shelter would develop a product more uniform in amount and quality.” The Inspector also found that on the whole, Grand Manan was the single largest producer of dulse in the Bay of Fundy and that “the industry at Digby and Annapolis [was] dying out.”9 No reason was offered as to why the dulse trade in Nova Scotia was floundering by 1923, but poor weather conditions may also have been to blame. These significant variations, as well as the ludicrous scope of Gregg’s request for exclusive picking rights, proved unappealing to the provincial government and the Maritime Dulse Company never materialized despite the profitable possibilities of selling “the tang of ocean spray.”10
Dulse continues to be a prevalent trade and big money on Grand Manan, but climate change and warming oceans do present significant challenges for the future. At Dark Harbour, quantities of dulse remain high but in recent years the quality of the seaweed has been impacted by above average rainfall and the increasing spread of coastal algae. In 2023, the CBC reported that the dulse season on Grand Manan that year was the “worst ever,” as pickers and sellers estimated sales to be only twenty percent of what was normal.11 A full century after similar circumstances had diminished the trade in Nova Scotia, weather remains a consistent problem for dulse pickers. Additionally, the appearance of grey leaf caused by algae attaching to Palmaria palmata is a more unprecedent challenge. Though grey-leafed dulse is still edible, it simply does not taste as good, effectively turning the red gold to brass. More recent years have been kinder to dulse pickers, and though the lack of rain during the Summer of 2025 has created dire conditions for farmers in New Brunswick – and dangerous conditions for wildfires – it has been ideal weather for drying dulse at Dark Harbour.
If you find yourself at the Saint John City Market, be sure to give dulse a try and take part in a New Brunswick culinary experience and history that’s been centuries in the making.
[1] “India House: Groceries, Groceries,” Carleton Sentinel (Woodstock, NB), November 5, 1853.
[2] Carleton Sentinel March 31, 1877.
[3] “And They All Went,” Evening Times (Saint John, New Brunswick), May 22, 1905.
[4] Daily Herald (Fredericton, NB), January 30, 1908.
[5] Miramichi Advance, September 16, 1897.
[6] M.F. Gregg to C.D. Richard, 25 November 1926, Correspondence re: dulse, RS106: Provincial Secretary, Fisheries, Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (hereafter PANB).
[7] A.F. Caesar to C.D. Richards, 22 December 1926, Correspondence re: dulse, RS106: Provincial Secretary, Fisheries, PANB.
[8] “Amounts and Marketed Value 1910-1924 (inclusive),” Correspondence re: dulse, RS106: Provincial Secretary, Fisheries, PANB. [Amounts for 1925 are added in on the report].
[9] “Amounts and Marketed Value 1910-1924 (inclusive),” PANB.
[10] “Dulse Has the Tang of Ocean Spray,” Daily Mail (Fredericton, NB), September 13, 1937.
[11] Mia Urquhart, “Grand Manan dulse season worst ever, say pickers and sellers,” CBC News New Brunswick, September 1, 2013.
Richard Yeomans
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