Britain and France marked the 120th anniversary on Monday of an agreement that ended centuries of rivalry between the two countries that had all-too-frequently involved war.
While people across Newfoundland noted the day for the solar eclipse, the Entente Cordiale the British and French noted had a more profound effect than the eclipse on Newfoundland and Labrador and helped shape the place we know today.
The Entente was actually four agreements, two of which involved Newfoundland, although many sources only refer to three. The lesser agreement was formally called a note and involved the establishment of consulates in Newfoundland and St. Pierre. This was related to a larger agreement that ended French rights to a strip of the coast of Newfoundland - commonly called the French Shore or the Treaty Shore - in exchange for territorial concessions from Britain in Africa.
The Entente document noted that the French controlled 40% of the coastline of Newfoundland in 1904. But to help appreciate what this meant, note that in the picture above there were actually two different strips of coast involved at different times. Out of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French could fish offshore off and occupy the coast of Newfoundland between Cape Bonavista and Point Riche on the western side of the Great Northern Peninsula. In the picture at the head of this column, Point Riche is roughly where the lower right corner of the box sits that containd the words “Strait of Bell Isle.”
From 1783 to 1904 the shore was the darker line along the coast and ran from Cape St. John on the Bay Verte peninsula westward along the shore to Cape Ray, near modern-day Port aux Basques. This period is most important because the shifting of the shore starts around the same time as the population of Newfoundland started to grew dramatically.
Fewer than 7,000 people in the 1780s became five and six times that many within a few decades such that in 1825, the British established a local government for the first time. This is the first local government in Newfoundland because it was not a colony of settlement but an industrial enterprise for the British, focused on the fishery. Within another seven years and based on aggressive agitation locally, the British gave a limited local involvement in that government starting in 1832. That proved unworkable and unacceptable to the politically active locals and ultimately in 1855, the British granted full local self-government to Newfoundland with the British only retaining control of defence and foreign policy.
As we talk about the French Shore, it’s important to understand there was an English shore that remained throughout the time we are speaking about anchored in the earliest settlements in the 1600s. English settlement remained confined to that eastern coast and only stretched into Placentia Bay and the Burin peninsula in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
In other words, the further west you went on the coast of Newfoundland, the less the English settlement along the coast not covered by the treaty with France. That also means necessarily that the local government officially had little or no contact with and meaningful control over those areas the farther you got from St. John’s. That English settlement was also focused seaward with little or no interest inland until more recently.
In Labrador, the general perception on the island in the ruling circles was that it was a strip of the coast extending from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the northern most tip along the Atlantic coast but it never went very far inland. Again, there’s that seaward bias in perceptions and a disinterest in the interior until later.
Notice a couple of things:
For the first 50 years of self-government, the whole island was not available to the government to develop or for people to settle. Even though it was only a strip of coast, it affected far more of the interior by limiting access. That 40% of the coast controlled by France hindered access to the prime farming areas on the west coast, for example. It influenced where the first paper mill went: not in what would become Corner Brook but in the interior with a sea port that was only available when the ice wasn’t blocking shipping from Botwood. The French Shore also affected where the Newfoundland railway came out on the west coast. Again, not at the optimum spot but where it is today.
The main part of the island was effectively a frontier or wilderness with little if any government control or presence. Same thing in Labrador. That also influenced the relationship between the government and Indigenous people, which is starkly different from what happened in Canada and the United States. True on the island and even moreso the case in Labrador.
In 1904, for the first time, the government at St. John’s had jurisdiction over the whole island. This had been a long-standing issue between Newfoundland and Britain but ultimately the settlement had nothing to do with the Newfoundland government, as such. It learned of the talks only in January 1904 when they got to a point where the British had to consult the local government on a prospective agreement that affect the local government.
Around the same time, Newfoundland also wanted to settle the Labrador boundary largely because some Canadian developers showed an interest in lumbering. The Newfoundland government prepared a legal case but the Great War interrupted the plan. As it turned out, it would be 1927 before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in London, settled the border with Canada giving Newfoundland an enormous territory that local leaders simply could not fathom at the time.
Just as the Great War stalled efforts at development on the island, so too did the collapse of self-government and the 15 years of the Commission mean that it would be the 1950s before any Newfoundland government could turn its attention to changing the economic future of the country with all the territory and resources controlled clearly defined. For a bonus, all the governments since Confederation could act with the safety net of Canada’s financial support.
In hindsight, then, the self-governing country Newfoundland was geographically incomplete for its first 50 years, with the better part of half of the island’s coastline outside its control and the size of Labrador unknown. Changing that was outside the government’s control and it had very little ability to force a change.
But it’s important to remember that starting around 1890, Newfoundland pushed as hard as it could continuously to change the country’s economic conditions. There were attempts at trade deals with the United States, scuttled once to satisfy Canadian objections and the second time to placate the British themselves. Newfoundland was throughout the 1890s saddled with ham-fisted, incompetent British governors, most notably Terrence O’Brien at the start of the decade and Henry MacCallum at the back end. They interfered in local issues representing British interests moreso than acting as the Sovereign’s stand-in
O’Brien caused such problems that he figured in one memoir by the British Secretary of State, Joe Chamberlain who used the example - without naming O’Brien - of the bone-headed former military officers who might work out in some colonies but in places like Canada or Newfoundland created endless havoc by going well beyond their proper place and being to stupid to understand what that was.
MacCallum meddled in local politics repeatedly and and harried the government for its refusal to bow to British demands to develop local military forces that would only be used to defend British strategic interests in Newfoundland. In 1901 he plotted to split the cabinet and replace Sir Robert Bond. When word of it got to Bond, he challenged the Secretary of State in writing and caused the British to end MacCallum’s term early. To give it context, this was more serious an event than the King-Byng crisis Canada faced 20 years later. In the event, Bond also wrested from the British the power to approve of the subsequent governors, and happily accepted the bumbling Cavendish Boyle who did not even know what his power were or William MacGregor who was generally unremarkable.
For his part, Bond’s successor Edward Morris also dealt with governors not equipped for their job and with British governments whose policies harmed Newfoundland. In the opening days of the Great War, the British seized all Newfoundland fish shipments bound for neutral countries under a wartime policy that did not recognise the economic impact it would have on places like Newfoundland. The result was that the country was robbed of cash and the government of revenue at a crucial time. It took Morris months to resolve the problem. Within the first year of war, he also had to restrain the governor who, while given a ceremonial and symbolic job as head of the Newfoundland Patriotic Association, thought he could also announce policies like the creation of a second battalion of soldiers for local defence. The governor did it once too often and created more political headaches for Morris’ administration despite knowing the financial state of the country, the government’s policy against creating such a force, as well as the lack of a threat that meant such a force was unnecessary. As head of NPA and as the governor, Ralph Williams also knew the difficulties in recruiting enough able-bodied men to make up the overseas battalion let alone create a second one that would idle at home. Morris wrote Williams a forcefully worded letter in which he directed the governor to stop making such commitments at once or else Morris would be compelled to contradict him publicly with all the embarrassing consequences the Governor and London.
The Entente Cordiale removed an enormous obstacle to Newfoundland’s development. It came at a time when Newfoundland political leaders forcefully asserted their country’s interests despite either indifference or sometimes opposition from Britain and other places. This was not a mere colony ruled by Britain for Britain and in some cases, Newfoundland asserted its sovereignty before Canada did, whether in the Bond-McCallum affair or in refusing to take part in the South African War (1899-1902).
In the larger sense, the end of the French treaty rights over 40% of the island’s coastline together with the settlement of the Labrador boundary gave the Newfoundland government the full control of the resources it would need to build the country. Other circumstances would delay that until almost a century after the first local government took office in 1855. What happened after 1949 is another story.
An interesting piece which opens a series of questions related to French settlements along the French shore and what happened to those people after 1904. In addition, did “control” over resources after 1904 result in turning those resources over to external capital for development? Does the practice continue today? Lots of rich material here. Thanks once again.