Papers in Canadian History and Environment, no. 8 (October 2026): 1-30

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.15003/16868

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The carrying trade, or the manufacturers of a country may decay—the timber in the Province maybe excluded from its best market, or it may be burnt in the forest, but the everlasting sea and its wealth are not subject to such variations—it refuses its gifts to none who properly seek them, and the country which possess a valuable Fishery around its shores, need never be poor[sic]……

Lauchlan Donaldson, John Ward, Jr., Thomas Barlow, James Brown, Thomas Wyer, and John Allen, “Report of the Bay of Fundy Deep-Sea Fisheries, Prepared by the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” 1 November 1836. ¹

In the winter session of 1834, New Brunswick’s House of Assembly received a petition from “Joel Ingersoll, Richard E. Foster, Asa Foster, Philip Newton, Caleb Benson, and one hundred and sixty others, [all being] inhabitants of the Island of Grand Manan, praying the present Act for the protection of the Herring Fishery at that place” continue as the law regulating the fishery.² These petitioners expressed anxieties about the fragility of herring stocks off the island, concerns grounded in lived experience of declining catches and attributed to the overuse of particular fishing methods. Their appeal called for greater government regulation to preserve the fishery, but it also asserted something more fundamental: that those who lived and worked on Grand Manan possessed the ecological knowledge necessary to understand and manage the resource on which their livelihoods depended.

That claim to environmental knowledge—and to the authority it implied—did not go uncontested. In the same legislative session, a separate petition from “Bartholemew Coxetter, Samuel Strange, John Kenney, and 51 others, engaged in the Fisheries at St. John,” was likewise received by the House, advocating for the return of the earlier 1824 Herring Fisheries Act “relative to the Grand Manan Herring Fishery.”³ This earlier act imposed fewer restrictions on access to the fishing grounds around Grand Manan and reflected the priorities of fishers based in Saint John, for whom herring functioned primarily as bait for the deep-sea cod and mackerel fisheries. Implicit in their petition was a competing claim: that the fishery should be governed according to the demands of a commercial system oriented toward large-scale extraction, rather than by the localized observations of island residents. In effect, Saint John fishers challenged the authority and local knowledge systems of Grand Manan inhabitants by suggesting that those most closely tied to the fishery understood it least.

These competing petitions expose a central tension in the environmental history of the Bay of Fundy. Fishers on Grand Manan understood herring as a critical component of a place-based food economy, embedded in seasonal rhythms and sustained through close observation of spawning grounds and coastal waters. Fishers from Saint John viewed the same resource as a mobile input within a broader commercial network, valuable primarily for its role in sustaining offshore fisheries. The issue before the House of Assembly was therefore not simply how to regulate the fishery, but whose ecological knowledge would shape that regulation and to what ends.

Grand Manan itself was central to this debate. As the largest island in the Fundy Archipelago, it occupied a prominent position within the maritime geography of the lower Bay of Fundy, linking Passamaquoddy Bay, the Gulf of Maine, and the wider Atlantic world. For generations, its inhabitants depended upon the success of the herring fishery in its coastal waters, which supported both local subsistence and participation in regional bait markets. At the same time, the island functioned as a navigational and ecological landmark within a maritime space shaped by both Indigenous and settler use. When renowned naturalist John James Audubon visited the island in the summer of 1833, he remarked upon how “the stupendous cliffs gradually emerged from the deep with majestic boldness.”⁴ Yet his observations also extended beyond the island itself. When he departed the island for Point Lepreau, Audubon encountered Peskotomuhkati fishers “gliding swiftly over the deep in fragile bark [canoes]” as they hunted porpoise, a reminder that the waters surrounding Grand Manan formed part of a broader Indigenous maritime world structured by mobility, seasonal use, and deep environmental knowledge.⁵

It was within this interconnected seascape that New Brunswick’s House of Assembly sought to intervene.⁶ In 1835, in response to the competing petitions, legislators struck a commission of inquiry to investigate the state of the herring fishery at Grand Manan, framing the conflict as one requiring formal investigation and authoritative resolution. The report produced by the Commission, based on depositions taken from fishers from both Grand Manan and Saint John and submitted during the winter session of 1836, was published as “No. 2, Reports of the Commissioners Appointed by the House of Assembly to Procure Information Respecting the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan.”⁷ The report advanced a set of conclusions that would shape subsequent legislation, drawing explicitly on British fisheries as a model—“where the Herring Fishery is so extensively and advantageously carried on, and where they have the accumulated experience of ages”—the report of the commissioners asserted that net fishing alone should be followed, that fishing by torch-light should be discouraged, and that “nothing like a belief in the return of herrings to a particular station is there generally entertained.”⁸

These findings reveal how the Commission reframed a local environmental dispute through the language of imperial expertise. In dismissing the idea that herring returned to specific spawning grounds and in questioning the sustainability of torch-lit fishing—both claims supported by the testimony of Grand Manan fishers—the Commission effectively subordinated local ecological knowledge to transatlantic models of practice and to the demands of a commercial fishery centred in Saint John. By analysing the depositions taken from fishers, and the conclusive reports produced by the commissioners in response, a liminal window into the struggle to regulate the herring fishery illuminates some of the local nuances around resource regulation in the lower Bay of Fundy. The controversy over the Grand Manan herring fishery thus underscores a broader dynamic in nineteenth-century environmental governance: while local knowledge could shape legislative debate, it could also be overridden when it conflicted with extractive economic priorities.

This article argues that the Herring Commission functioned as a key site where competing forms of environmental knowledge were evaluated, contested, and hierarchized within the structures of colonial governance. By tracing the movement from petition to inquiry to legislation, it demonstrates how the ecological observations of Grand Manan fishers were translated, challenged, and ultimately displaced in the making of provincial fisheries policy. In doing so, it situates the regulation of the herring fishery within a wider history of environmental knowledge in British North America and the regulation of the northwest Atlantic fishery, one in which questions of sustainability, authority, and access were inseparable from the expansion of commercial resource extraction and the marginalization of Indigenous and place-based ways of knowing the sea. As Thomas Wickman argues, there is a need to “frame food history spatially around sovereignty, alliances, access, and exclusion.”⁹ The history of a contested fishery in the Bay of Fundy similarly demonstrates how colonial laws and policies that modified food resources and excluded certain technologies of access repositioned the powers of the settler-colonial state.

The conflicts that unfolded around the Grand Manan herring fishery were not isolated but reflect broader patterns in the environmental governance of nineteenth-century British North America and northwest Atlantic fisheries. Historians of fisheries and resource regulation have demonstrated that efforts to manage fish stocks were closely tied to questions of economic development, jurisdiction, and the uneven recognition of Indigenous and local knowledge systems. Yet despite these wider scholarly conversations, the specific case of Grand Manan—so central to the legislative record of New Brunswick—has received surprisingly little sustained historical attention. In Thomas Blake Earl’s recent study, The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America, Grand Manan and its inhabitants appear as caught in the aftermath of the Convention of 1818. Although that treaty closed the inshore fishery to American vessels, it allowed them to land for wood and water, effectively positioning the island as a maritime way station between competing British and American fishing interests.¹⁰ In the wake of these arrangements, the island became an increasingly contested space, where questions of access, jurisdiction, and resource use were negotiated on a daily basis. But in most cases, Grand Manan appears only as a minor case study within a broader discussion about American incursions into British waters and the overproduction of the fisheries by both foreign and local vessels seeking to extract greater capital from the shallows of Passamaquoddy Bay.¹¹

The question of how extractive settler industries such as the fishery were negotiated by local actors has been taken up most directly by Brian J. Payne in Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North Atlantic, 1818–1910. Rather than treating the waters surrounding Grand Manan as simply the object of imperial regulation or diplomatic dispute following the Convention of 1818, Payne situates the lower Bay of Fundy within a broader, loosely bounded maritime world in which fishers themselves articulated and enforced systems of access. In the decades before 1850, he argues, colonial authorities in the northwest Atlantic exercised only limited and inconsistent control over inshore fisheries, leaving local inhabitants and itinerant crews—particularly from New England—to negotiate the terms of resource use through practice, proximity, and custom.¹² Payne conceptualizes this process as “environmental territorialism,” whereby fishers asserted informal but meaningful claims to fishing grounds, bait resources, and shore space that did not map neatly onto imperial or national jurisdictions.¹³ Around Grand Manan, these overlapping claims produced frequent conflict, but also a shared, if unstable, set of expectations about access that governed everyday fishing activity. The island was not a peripheral site of Anglo-American rivalry, but part of a transnational fishery in which authority was fragmented, negotiated, and grounded in the lived realities of work at sea.

At the same time, Payne’s reconstruction of this “borderless” fishery privileges debates and testimony generated within the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, largely overlooking the rich legislative record produced in New Brunswick.¹⁴ This imbalance is particularly significant for understanding Grand Manan, which figured prominently in New Brunswick’s own inquiries into the fishery early in the nineteenth century. If Payne’s concept of environmental territorialism emphasizes how fishers articulated claims through practice, proximity, and custom, then the proceedings of the 1836 Herring Fishery Commission offer an opportunity to see these claims rendered visible in a more formal, institutional setting that demonstrates how local environmental knowledge had the capacity to influence the terms of resource use.

Although the number of historical studies specific to the Grand Manan fishery are few, the same cannot be said of the level of attention paid to the broader history of the northwest Atlantic fisheries, particularly after 1870.¹⁵ For example, in Clearing the Coastline: The Nineteenth-Century Ecological & Cultural Transformation of Cape Cod, Matthew McKenzie argues that the “Cape Cod coastal realm represented a complex intersection of changing labor regimes, economic orientations, ecological changes, and cultural representation.”¹⁶ Much like McKenzie’s post-1860 Cape Cod, Grand Manan requires a focus on the people who lived at the intersection of overlapping claims to a fishery that required different gear and served different purposes. The competing cultures and economies illustrated by debates leading up to New Brunswick’s Herring Fishery Commission serve as an earlier and equally significant example as to how local labour experienced and negotiated ecological change. Others, such as Richard Judd, have documented the experiences of this change within the context of an emerging moral economy produced by coastal fisheries out of Maine that extended into the Bay of Fundy. However, Grand Manan’s fisheries need to be considered against the backdrop of earlier British imperial and colonial state resource governance.¹⁷

Island spaces like Grand Manan also offer important insights into the development of settler colonial and environmental histories. Similar work on the history of Prince Edward Island done by Edward MacDonald, Joshusa MacFadyen, and Irené Novaczek, shows that over “many centuries [an] Island’s sea, soil, and climate have offered rich habitat for plant and wildlife and valuable resources for First Nations, [and] fishers.”¹⁸ The same can certainly be said of Grand Manan. Moreover, by building off of the work done by historian Micah Pawling, who examines mobility and networks in Wabanaki homelands in Maine, Grand Manan should also be positioned as an important part of a greater Peskotomuhkai network of mobility when considering how and why the New Brunswick House of Assembly enacted legislation in the region that responded to tensions between competing types of economies in the bay.¹⁹

Fishers on Grand Manan were among the first in the Bay of Fundy to register concern over declining fish stocks in the early nineteenth century. They attributed this depletion in part to the practices of American vessels, whose disposal of fish offal along the island’s coast damaged spawning grounds for herring. For islanders, these were not abstract concerns but immediate threats to a place-based food economy. Their calls for regulation reflected both ecological observation and economic necessity, and they increasingly looked to the provincial state to intervene in ways that imperial authorities had not. American participation in the region’s fisheries had long been recognized by British officials as a source of tension, culminating in the Convention of 1818, which established a three-mile exclusion zone barring American fishers from inshore waters.²⁰ Yet the Convention did not resolve the problem in practice. Enforcement by the Royal Navy remained inconsistent, and in the Bay of Fundy fishers continued to encounter American vessels operating within contested coastal spaces. As a result, responsibility for regulation shifted, in effect if not in law, to colonial authorities. In New Brunswick, meaningful enforcement efforts began only in the 1820s, but most coastal communities were left to navigate a regulatory regime that was unevenly applied and frequently contested.²¹

By the 1830s, these tensions had expanded beyond questions of jurisdiction to encompass deeper disagreements over how fisheries should be prosecuted. On Grand Manan, fishers advocated for tighter controls designed to protect spawning grounds and sustain local access. Elsewhere in the region, however, fishers and merchants resisted restrictions that might limit or reduce yields within an increasingly commercialized, export-oriented fishery. The resulting conflict was not simply between British and American interests, but among settlers themselves, reflecting competing forms of environmental knowledge and rival visions of how coastal resources should be used. It was within this context that the 1836 Herring Fishery Commission was convened. The inquiry formed part of a broader pattern of colonial investigation, but it was distinctive in both its focus and its political timing.²² Established by the House of Assembly, the commission emerged during a period of infighting between the Assembly and the Executive Council over control of revenues and the scope of colonial governance. Across British North America, the 1830s were marked by political unrest and constitutional uncertainty, and New Brunswick was no exception. The tenure of New Brunswick’s Lieutenant Governor Sir Archibald Campbell, whose imperial priorities frequently clashed with the Assembly’s assertions of local authority, underlined the extent to which questions of governance remained unsettled.²³

The constitutional debates occurring throughout British North America are central to understanding the Herring Commission as more than a technical investigation into the state of a single fishery. It was also an assessment and assertion of legislative competence. Since its establishment in 1784, New Brunswick’s government had relied on commissions to examine issues ranging from the judiciary to natural disaster, but the 1836 inquiry was the first to be initiated directly by the House to evaluate the effectiveness of existing resource legislation. In doing so, it positioned the regulation of the herring fishery as a test case for the colony’s ability to govern its own territorial waters.

This legislative ambition had a clear foundation. Beginning in 1819, the House of Assembly passed a series of increasingly detailed acts to regulate the herring fisheries in the lower Bay of Fundy.²⁴ These laws sought to prevent the obstruction of spawning grounds by prohibiting the placement of nets and weirs within coastal zones and inland waterways where fish congregated. They also introduced mechanisms of oversight, including the appointment of fishery overseers, and imposed significant fines for violations. Notably, such acts often included sunset clauses, requiring periodic review and renewal. This practice allowed the House not only to refine its regulatory approach, but also to continually reassert its authority over resource management. By the mid-1830s, this evolving legislative framework had produced a complex but still contested system of regulation. The persistence of disputes—over access, methods, and enforcement—revealed the limits of existing laws and the difficulty of reconciling local ecological concerns with the demands of a commercial fishery. The depositions collected by the 1836 Commission must be understood against this backdrop. They capture a moment in which competing claims to knowledge, authority, and resource use were brought into direct conversation, as the colonial state sought to determine not only how the fishery functioned, but how it ought to be governed.

As herring fishery legislation became more elaborate in the early 1830s, it increasingly incorporated the environmental knowledge of those who worked the waters. For example, an 1834 act of the legislature, which imposed seasonal restrictions aligned with herring spawning cycles between July and October, formalized long-standing observations advanced by Grand Manan fishers who sought to protect local stocks through regulation.²⁵ These measures, however, exposed a growing divide within the regional fishery. While island fishers—led by Joel Ingersoll—petitioned the House of Assembly in 1835 to maintain the act unchanged after its scheduled review, fishers from Saint John, whose operations depended on herring as bait for more expansive deep-sea fisheries across the Bay of Fundy and beyond, called for its repeal and a return to less restrictive laws.²⁶ Faced with these competing petitions, the House referred the matter to a select committee composed of Thomas Wyer, James Brown, and John Allen, men who would soon serve as commissioners in the 1836 inquiry.

The depositions gathered by the commissioners in September 1836 reveal a fishery understood through fundamentally incompatible frameworks of environmental knowledge, each tied to different practices, scales of operation, and economic priorities. While witnesses were asked similar questions—about the decline of herring stocks, the effects of different fishing methods, and the utility of existing laws—their answers coalesced into distinct, and often irreconcilable, interpretations of the marine environment. These interpretations were echoed by the technologies employed in the local coastal fishery on Grand Manan: the torch light and the dip net. Fishers would set off from the shore at dusk and the light emitted by the torch attracted fish, which were then collected in dip nets dropped alongside small boats. Fishers from Saint John used larger vessels to pursue the deep-sea fishery and trawled with long nets (drift nets) near the shore to catch herring to use as bait. These nets, which were sometimes hundreds of yards in length, were suspended in the water and left to drift but weighted at the bottom to catch as many fish as possible, dragging through the shallows that herring used to spawn. The size of the opening in the net determined the size of the fish that could be caught. In the earliest years of the fishery, however, regulations had little impact on the use of long nets near shore to catch bait.

In their testimony to the commissioners, fishers from Grand Manan overwhelmingly attributed the decline of herring to the expansion of netting, particularly the use of long nets on or near spawning grounds. William Gubtail [Guptill], drawing on nearly four decades of experience, answered plainly that the decrease was due “to the nets,” emphasizing that under earlier methods “they did not decrease,” but “they decreased” once long nets were introduced.²⁷ This temporal distinction—between an earlier, sustainable fishery based on torch-lighting and dip nets, and a later, extractive regime defined by netting—was repeated across multiple testimonies. Etheil Smith recalled that before netting “we could drive as many as we wanted,” but that within a few years “the fish grew very scarce.”²⁸ Similarly, Richard Foster attributed the long-term decline “to the system of netting on the spawning grounds,” while Samuel Chaney stressed that long nets were most destructive because “they destroy the spawn herring.”²⁹

These claims were not simply technical critiques but rested on a shared understanding of herring behaviour. Grand Manan fishers consistently described herring as returning to specific spawning grounds according to a seasonal rhythm, making them vulnerable to over-exploitation at predictable moments. Gubtail asserted that herring spawned “from the Northern to the Southern end of Grand Manan, and from May till December,” while others identified particular locations such as Seal Cove and Whale Cove.³⁰ Joel Ingersoll reinforced this spatial precision, noting that “at Seal Cove in particular, I have seen the net warp as large as my arm with the spawn,” and warning that netting in such areas “would break it up.”³¹ In this view, the fishery’s decline was not random but the direct consequence of disrupting reproductive cycles through inappropriate technology deployed in ecologically sensitive spaces.

From this perspective, legislation—however imperfect—was both necessary and, at times, demonstrably effective. Several witnesses pointed to the 1831 act as having allowed stocks to recover, at least temporarily. Gubtail noted that herring “increased” after its passage, while Smith similarly observed that “they increased” when the law was enforced and fishers were “more cautious.”³² Others were more emphatic. For example, Daniel Gatcomb claimed that “but for it we should have had none,” and Foster argued that without restrictive laws “the fishery will go entirely to decay.”³³ Even when acknowledging continued decline in the mid-1830s, these fishers attributed failure not to regulation itself, but to insufficient enforcement or subsequent relaxation. As Gubtail put it, earlier legislation had failed because it was not “sufficiently strict.” ³⁴

In contrast, testimony from Saint John fishers—and a minority of witnesses on Grand Manan—articulated a markedly different understanding of both fish behaviour and the causes of scarcity. Rejecting the notion of fixed spawning grounds, John Kenney insisted that herring were fundamentally unpredictable, their movements “uncertain and governed entirely by wind and weather.”³⁵ From this perspective, fluctuations in the fishery were natural rather than the result of human intervention. Consequently, the scale of extraction posed little threat. When asked if he thought dramatically increasing the amount of catch would harm future stocks, Kenney responded unequivocally, “I do not.”³⁶

This confidence in the resilience—or inexhaustibility—of herring underpinned a broader critique of regulation. For Kenney, the laws of 1831 and 1834 represented not protection but economic harm: “no good has resulted, but the greatest evil that ever happened to the country.”³⁷ He further maintained that, absent such restrictions, he “could catch fifty barrels tonight if I were allowed,” framing regulation as an artificial constraint on abundance rather than a response to ecological limits. In this account, the primary threat to the fishery was not netting but competing practices such as torch fishing, which he claimed, “drives the fish out of the harbours, and is the means of destroying the whole herring fishery.”³⁸

Notably, dissenting voices within Grand Manan itself echoed aspects of this interpretation, complicating any simple geographic divide. James Drake, for instance, downplayed the impact of fishing methods altogether, arguing that netting was “not more injurious than driving [with a torch]” and attributing decline instead to “the uncertainty of the herring” and ecological competition, particularly “the mackerel having displaced the herring.”³⁹ John Cunningham similarly rejected the idea of predictable spawning, asserting that herring “do not” necessarily return to Grand Manan and that their movements were “uncertain.”⁴⁰ For such witnesses, environmental variability—and not human practice—explained the instability of the fishery, rendering legislative intervention of limited value.

Taken together, these depositions reveal a fishery contested not only over access and technique, but over the very nature of marine life and the limits of human intervention. Grand Manan fishers advanced a model rooted in localized observation, in which herring were understood as seasonally and spatially bound, and therefore vulnerable to over-exploitation. Saint John fishers, by contrast, operated within a more expansive, mobile framework that emphasized variability, abundance, and the primacy of extraction. The Commission thus became a forum in which these competing forms of environmental knowledge were articulated through the testimony of fishers and set against one another.

Testimony before the Commission also reveals not only the persistence of locally grounded expectations about access to herring, bait grounds, and shore space, but also the extent to which these expectations came into conflict with the interests of merchants and fishers based in Saint John, whose investments in the fishery depended on wider, more mobile patterns of exploitation. Read through the lens of environmental territorialism, these disputes were not simply matters of regulation or economic competition but reflected competing efforts to define legitimate use of a shared marine environment. In this sense, the 1836 Commission can be understood not as a departure from the informal world Payne describes, but as a moment in which those vernacular regimes of resource control were contested, translated, and unevenly incorporated into colonial law.

Tensions between fishers from Saint John and Grand Manan were shaped by the fact that herring occupied different positions within their respective local economies. For Grand Manan fishers, herring functioned both as a staple food source and as part of a small-scale bait fishery. For fishers from Saint John, by contrast, herring were primarily a critical input in a broader extractive system, supporting offshore catches such as mackerel and cod. As a result, efforts to regulate or preserve herring stocks around Grand Manan by an act of the House of Assembly were not simply attempts at conservation in a modern ecological sense, or as the protection of a shared resource from overuse. Rather, they were embedded in the island’s subsistence economy, where fish stocks were closely tied to the viability of settlement itself.

To address what they framed as the underdevelopment of this fishery, the commissioners produced a separate report on the Bay of Fundy deep-sea fisheries. In it, they extended their analysis from resource management to the social and spatial organization of the island. They recommended the “purchase of two or three sites for villages” on Grand Manan, arguing that concentrating settlement would allow fishers to become less dependent on fisheries for subsistence and more effectively supplied through local agriculture.⁴¹ Notably, the report offered no sustained assessment of Grand Manan’s soil quality, agricultural capacity, or the practical feasibility of this transformation, suggesting instead that settlement patterns themselves were the primary constraint on productivity. By recommending the establishment of new villages created specifically to support the deep-sea fishery, the commissioners were engaged in imagining and promoting a way of life that threatened to displace settlers and all who carried on the practices of subsistence through the use of the local coastal ecosystems.

The report also drew on comparative data from British fisheries, including a table showing the expansion of cured herring production between 1810 and 1827—from roughly 90,000 to nearly 400,000 barrels—which it attributed in part to the adoption of long nets and improved organization. This statistical comparison was used to justify a need for similar interventions in the Bay of Fundy fishery, including the introduction of long nets and the extension of state support through a bounty “for the encouragement of the trade.”⁴² In this way, the commissioners linked technological change, state subsidy, and spatial reorganization into a single programme of improvement for Grand Manan.

Their logic of improvement, and the treatment of productivity, settlement, and improvement as mutually reinforcing objectives, also demonstrates how the commissioners were attempting to foist a distinctly nineteenth-century liberal order on Grand Manan.⁴³ Their recommendations did not emerge from an environmentalist concern for ecological preservation in any modern sense, but from an assumption that properly organized human activity would unlock—and stabilize—the island’s natural abundance. In this framework, ecological knowledge of fisheries was inseparable from a governing project aimed at reshaping labour, space, and subsistence practices. The result was a form of environmental reasoning that sought not to limit extraction, but to rationalize it through disciplined settlement, agricultural supplementation, and state-supported expansion.⁴⁴ Even where the commissioners expressed anxiety about decline or inefficiency, their solutions consistently pointed toward deeper integration of Grand Manan into liberal-imperial logics of improvement and extraction, rather than restraint.

The same assumptions about productivity, order, and legibility that underpinned the commissioners’ vision of improvement also structured their approach to evidence, determining which aspects of the fishery were made visible in testimony and how different groups of fishers were positioned within the inquiry. Only the Commission’s report on the herring fishery drew directly on testimony from local fishers. Those from Grand Manan were typically questioned about the abundance and movement of fish stocks, while fishers from Saint John were asked to assess financial losses associated with the 1834 Herring Fisheries Act. Across both groups, however, the commissioners repeatedly focused attention on the practice of torch-lit fishing and its perceived effects on herring populations.

Torch fishing itself was not an isolated settler invention, but a technique developed by Indigenous fishers and adopted by settler fishers in the lower Bay of Fundy. As Victor Lytwyn has shown, nocturnal hunting and fishing with fire was widespread among Algonquin-speaking peoples, particularly in the Great Lakes region, and relied on birch bark torches mounted on canoes to illuminate shallow waters and concentrate fish for spearing or netting.⁴⁵ Among Wabanaki peoples of the northeastern seaboard, including the Peskotomuhkati, such practices formed part of a broader maritime economy rooted in the coastal ecologies between the Wolastoq and Penobscot river systems. The word Peskotomuhkati itself—“People who seek pollock”—signals the centrality of fishing to cultural and subsistence life, a relationship that continues to be affirmed by Indigenous fishers today.⁴⁶

In the lower Bay of Fundy, settler fishers on Grand Manan adapted these techniques, using torches to draw herring to the surface for capture in dip nets. Although witnesses before the Commission claimed that torch fishing had long been the standard local method and was not harmful to herring stocks, the commissioners treated the practice as a regulatory problem. In their final recommendations, they urged “that the Law be so altered that neither driving by lights, nor fishing with [dip] nets, be allowed on the shores of Grand Manan… except for the purpose of procuring bait for the deep-sea fishery.”⁴⁷ In effect, a widely used and locally grounded method of harvesting fish was redefined as an excessive or illegitimate form of access, permissible only when used to support offshore commercial extraction.

The legislative outcome of the report reinforced this hierarchy of use. The revised fisheries statute of 1837 eliminated earlier seasonal protections and reinstated a more permissive framework for commercial exploitation, while leaving unresolved—and selectively exempting—the question of torch fishing for bait.⁴⁸ At the same time, subsequent legislation increasingly restricted torch-lit fishing for species such as salmon, alongside broader colonial efforts to curtail Indigenous harvesting practices. The 1851 Fisheries Act, for example, banned torch fishing for salmon entirely, while preserving limited allowances for herring in ways that aligned with commercial interests in Saint John and elsewhere.⁴⁹

Read alongside contemporaneous policy shifts in British North America, these regulatory changes in New Brunswick formed part of a wider colonial reordering of access to land and water resources. Colonial officials increasingly viewed Indigenous harvesting practices as obstacles to the cultivation of more settled and commercially oriented forms of labour. For example, in an 1841 report, Moses Perley, New Brunswick’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs, criticized the Wolastoqiyik community near the Tobique River for taking salmon “by the spear and torch” and suggested that the destruction of the fishery through the construction of dams and saw mills might “induce the Indians to adopt more settled habits of industry” and devote greater attention to agriculture.⁵⁰ Similar assumptions appeared in an 1844 commission on Indian Affairs in the Province of Canada, which recommended that “the Indians be discouraged from looking to Game as a means of support.”⁵¹ In this context, restrictions on torch fishing were not simply early conservation measures or responses to ecological concerns. Rather, they formed part of a broader effort to displace Indigenous and local systems of harvesting in favour of regulated, state-legible forms of resource use, rendering older practices of access to marine resources increasingly illegible, restricted, and subordinate to commercial modes of extraction.

The controversy over the Grand Manan herring fishery reveals that early nineteenth-century fisheries regulation in New Brunswick was not simply a matter of conserving resources or resolving local disputes, but a process through which competing forms of environmental knowledge were evaluated and reordered within an emerging framework of colonial governance.⁵² What began as a petition grounded in the ecological observations of island fishers—rooted in seasonal rhythms, spawning grounds, and the limits of extraction—was transformed through the machinery of inquiry into a problem of productivity, organization, and economic potential. The Herring Commission did not merely adjudicate between competing claims; it redefined the terms on which those claims could be recognized at all in the eyes of the colonial state.

By privileging forms of knowledge that aligned with commercial expansion and imperial models of fisheries management in their report, the commissioners effectively displaced the place-based understandings advanced by Grand Manan fishers. At the same time, their recommendations extended beyond the regulation of fish stocks to encompass the reorganization of settlement, labour, and subsistence, embedding the fishery within a broader liberal project of improvement. This was not a retreat from environmental concern, but its reconfiguration: ecological knowledge was rendered meaningful only insofar as it could be made legible to, and productive within, a system oriented toward ever-increasing extraction. The commissioner’s recommendation of restricting torch-lit fishing further illustrates the settler-colonial dynamics of this transformation. A practice used by the Peskotomuhkati and adapted by local settler fishers was recast as a problem of governance, one that needed to be controlled and subjected to the needs of the deep-sea fishery. In doing so, the Commission contributed to a wider colonial effort to discipline access to marine space and increasingly marginalized Indigenous and locally grounded modes of harvesting fish in favour of regulated, state-sanctioned forms of taking catch. Situating Grand Manan within this history complicates narratives of both environmental management and imperial authority in the northwest Atlantic. It shows that environmental territorialism was not only negotiated among fishers, as Payne suggests, but also reshaped through colonial institutions that sought to formalize, standardize, and ultimately control access to the sea. In tracing how local environmental knowledge was incorporated, contested, and displaced, the Herring Commission shows the extent to which the governance of fisheries in New Brunswick was inseparable from projects of settler colonialism, economic expansion, and the remaking of coastal environments into spaces for regulated extraction.

Acknoledgements: The first draft of this paper circulated during the 2025 meeting of the Northeast and Atlantic Region Environmental History Forum (NEAR-EH) at Mount Alison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. We want to thank those workshop participants whose early feedback helped set the direction and tone of this article. We are also grateful to the Editors and peer reviewers of PiCHE for their insights that sharpened the argument. Finally, we want to acknowledge the work, mentorship, and friendship of Elizabeth Mancke and Bill Parenteau who have shaped us as both scholars and writers. They taught us that good scholarship always puts collaboration with others first.

[1] Government of New Brunswick, “Appendix No. 2, Reports of the Commissioners Appointed by the House of Assembly to Procure Information Respecting the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” in Journal of the House of Assembly of the Province of New Brunswick, from the Twentieth Day of December to the First Day of March. (Fredericton: John Simpson, 1837), xxvi.

[2] 12 February 1834, Journal of the House of Assembly of New Brunswick from February to March: 1834 (Fredericton, N.B.: J. Simpson, 1834), 169.

[3] 14 February 1834, Journal of the House of Assembly of New Brunswick 1834, 176.

[4] Christoph Irmscher and Richard J. King, eds., Audubon at Sea: The Coastal and Transatlantic Adventures of John James Audubon (The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 194.

[5] Irmscher and King, eds., Audubon at Sea, 194.

[6] Historian Micah Pawling has traced the homelands of the Passamaquoddy and their ability to remain mobile in this environment. See: Micah Pawling, “Wabanaki Homeland and Mobility: Concepts of Home in Nineteenth-Century Maine,” Ethnohistory 63, no. 4 (2016): 621–43, https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-3633232.

[7] Government of New Brunswick, “Appendix No. 2, Reports of the Commissioners,” xiii.

[8] Government of New Brunswick, “Appendix No. 2, Reports of the Commissioners,” xv.

[9] Thomas Wickman, “Our Best Places: Gender, Food Sovereignty, and Miantonomi’s Kin on the Connecticut River,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19, no. 2 (2021): 218, https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2021.0008. We would also be remiss not to acknowledge the work of the late Bill Parenteau who helped shape our understanding of the past during his time at the University of New Brunswick. See: Bill Parenteau, “‘Care, Control and Supervision’: Native People in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867-1900,” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1998): 1–35, 453696, https://doi.org/10.3138/CHR.79.1.1; Bill Parenteau, “A ‘Very Determined Opposition to the Law’: Conservation, Angling Leases, and Social Conflict in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867-1914,” Environmental History 9, no. 3 (2004): 436–63, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985768.

[10] Thomas Blake Earl, The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 2023), 80–86, 90–91.

[11] Brian Payne, “Fishing the North Atlantic Border Seas: American Capital in a New Environment, 1818-1854,” Acadiensis, (Fall 2005): 126.

[12] Bryan Payne, Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North Atlantic, 1818-1910 (Michigan State University Press, 2010), 124.

[13] Payne, Fishing a Borderless Sea, xiv, 53, 128.

[14] Payne, Fishing a Borderless Sea, xvii. Payne uses the concept of borderlands or, to be more precise to his language, “border-sea,” to encapsulate how jurisdiction over water was often only an idea and not something easily enforced and leading to territorial disputes at sea. However, in Payne’s first chapter on the rise of the bait fishery, he exclusively relies on records from the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. The bait fishery and the question of taking catch such as herring in New Brunswick waters and how the legislative assembly there responded to the challenges of resource regulation requires an analysis of that province’s legislative record.

[15] Atlantic Canadian historian Bill Parenteau explores competing socio-environmental cultural relationships and the salmon fishery but begins his work after 1867. See for example: Parenteau, “A ‘Very Determined Opposition to the Law,’” 436–63; Parenteau, “‘Care, Control and Supervision,’” 1–35.

[16] Matthew G. McKenzie, Clearing the Coastline: The Nineteenth-Century Ecological & Cultural Transformation of Cape Cod (University Press of New England, 2010), 3.

[17] See: Richard William Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Harvard University Press, 1997).

[18] Edward MacDonald et al., “Introduction: Promise and Premise: An Environmental History for Prince Edward Island,” in Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island, ed. Edward MacDonald et al. (McGill-Queen’s University Press and Island Studies Press, 2016), 6.

[19] Pawling, “Wabanaki Homeland and Mobility.”

[20] Earle, The Liberty to Take Fish, 58–75.

[21] New Brunswick began enforcing the Convention in 1822, however, there were more American fishers than patrol vessels. For more on how the Bay of Fundy and the Convention of 1818 factored into the British and American relationships see: Earle, The Liberty to Take Fish, 76–99.

[22] Similar challenges to imperial authority via colonial contestation arose in New Brunswick about the state of the militia. See: Elizabeth Mancke et al., “‘their unalienable right and privilege’: New Brunswick’s Challenge to the Militarization of the British Empire, 1807-1814,” Acadiensis 46, no.1 (winter/spring): 49–72.

[23] Of the New Brunswick House of Assembly, Campbell claimed the body to be both “unpatriotic and… disloyal,” underscoring the ideological fault lines that shaped New Brunswick’s legislative prerogatives during an age of reform. Quoted in Phillip Buckner, “CAMPBELL, Sir ARCHIBALD,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed May 30, 2025 https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/campbell_archibald_7E.html.

[24] 59 Geroge III Chapter 16,  “An Act to regulate the Herring Fisheries in the Parishes of West-Isles, Campo-Bello, Pennfield, and Saint George, in the County of Charlotte,” in Acts of the General Assembly of His Majesty’s Province of New-Brunswick passed in the year 1819, (Fredericton, NB: George K. Lugrin, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1819).

[25] Seasonality was first reflected in the restricting of net setting, prohibited between late July through to mid-October. This law was passed in 1834. See: 4 William IV – Chapter 16, “An Act to continue and amend the Acts relating to the Herring Fisheries in the County of Charlotte,” in Acts of the General Assembly of His Majesty’s Province of New-Brunswick passed in the year 1834 (Fredericton, NB: John Simpson, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1834).

[26] 4 February 1835, Journal of the House of Assembly of New Brunswick from February to March: 1835 (Fredericton, N.B.: J. Simpson, 1835), 337.

[27] William Gubtail Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” in Journal of the House of Assembly of New Brunswick from February to March: 1836. (Fredericton, N.B.: J. Simpson, 1836), appendix, xxvii.

[28] Etheil Smith Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xxix.

[29] Richard Foster Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xsx; Samuel Chaney Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xxxii-xxxiii.

[30] William Gubtail Examined, appendix, xxvii.

[31] Joel Ingersoll Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xxxiv.

[32] Etheil Smith Examined, appendix, xxix.

[33] Daniel Gatcomb Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xxix-xsx.

[34] William Gubtail Examined, appendix, xxviii.

[35] John Kenney Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xxxv.

[36] John Kenney Examined, appendix, xxxv.

[37] John Kenney Examined, appendix, xxxv.

[38] John Kenney Examined, appendix, xxxv.

[39] James Drake Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xxxi.

[40] John Cunningham Examined, “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xxxi-xxxii.

[41] “Report on the Bay of Fundy Deep-Sea Fishery,” [Published as part of “Appendix No. 2, Reports of the Commissioners Appointed by the House of Assembly to Procure Information Respecting the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan.”] appendix xxv.

[42] “Report on the Bay of Fundy Deep-Sea Fishery,” appendix xxv.

[43] The classic exploration on the rise of the liberal order in Canada is Ian McKay’s “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81, no. 4 (2000): 616–678. For more recent interpretations with specific regard to fishers and the fishery, see Sean Cadigan, “The Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815-1855,” Labour/Le Travail 43 (Spring 1999): 9–42; Elizabeth Mancke and Sydney Crain, “Herring, the Moral Economy, and the Liberal Order Framework,” Borealia (2022), https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/2022/03/14/herring-the-moral-economy-and-the-liberal-order-framework/ [ accessed April 25, 2026].

[44] For a relevant discussion on state-sponsored efforts at regulating or conserving the landscape or nature for greater productivity by settlers, see Stephane Castonguay and Darin Kinsey, “The Nature of the Liberal Order: State Formation, Conservation, and the Government of Non-Humans in Canada,” in Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, eds.  Jean-Francois Constant and Michel Ducharme, (University of Toronto Press, 2009): 221–245, esp. 230–231.

[45] Victor Lytwyn, “Torchlight Prey: Night Hunting and Fishing by Aboriginal People in the Great Lakes Region,” in Actes du Trente-deuxième Congrès des Algonquinistes 32, ed. John D. Nichols, (University of Manitoba Press, 2001), 304. 

[46] “The Passamaquoddy Alternative,” Island Journal (Island Institute, 2014), https://www.islandinstitute.org/island-journal/passamaquoddy-alternative/ [accessed June 2025].

[47] “Report of the Commission to Investigate the State of the Herring Fishery at Grand Manan,” appendix, xvii, emphasis in original.

[48] 7 William IV – Chapter 36, “An Act relating to the Herring Fisheries in the County of Charlotte,” in Acts of the General Assembly of His Majesty’s Province of New-Brunswick passed in the year 1837, (Fredericton, NB: John Simpson, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1837).

[49] 14 Victoria – Chapter 31, “An Act for the protection and regulation of the Sea and River Fisheries of this Province,” in Acts of the General Assembly of Her Majesty’s Province of New-Brunswick passed in the year 1851, (Fredericton, NB: John Simpson, Printer to the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1851).

[50] Moses Henry Perley, “Reports on Indian Settlements, Extracts from Mr. Perley’s First Report Respecting the Indians on the Saint John,” in Journal of the House of Assembly of the Province of New Brunswick from the Nineteenth day of January to the Fourth Day of April (Fredericton: John Simpson, 1842), appendix, xcv–xcvi.

[51] Quoted in Lytwyn, “Torchlight Prey,” 310.

[52] The idea of competing forms of knowledge in the context of resource regulation is perhaps best explored in works that seek to understand the integration and validation of Indigenous knowledge systems within western science. See: Leslie King, “Competing Knowledge Systems in the Management of Fish and Forests in the Pacific Northwest,” International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics 4, no. 2 (2004): 165; Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Knowledge and Resource Management (Taylor and Francis, 1999); Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, (Milkweed Editions, 2013).