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| 121 Conclusion After the 1910 decision at The Hague, the bait trade between American and Canadian fishermen continued in its usual manner. Americans were permitted to enter local waters to purchase bait and supplies so long as they did not interfere with the exclusive rights of local fishermen to harvest the catch themselves. After a hundred years of diplomatic communications, three treaties, three failed treaties, and a series of modi vivendi, the actual operations of the bait trade had changed very little. The reason for this is because local fishermen succeeded, by about 1830, in creating and enforcing their own informal codes of conduct. These rules limited extraction within the local environment to the local population, while at the same time allowing that population to participate in the global fish trade. Local bait fishermen and their international customers successfully navigated both national politics and international diplomacy, as well as the various legal codes established by both, to create a unique economy based on limited resource extraction and community-defined stewardship. Those communities involved in the North Atlantic fisheries created locally defined informal codes of conduct—rules created through collective action, peer pressure, crowd protest, or intimidation that were outside or beyond the formal laws or regulations as set by local, national, or imperial legislation, or 122 | c o n c l u s i o n by international treaty. In 1836 mackerel fishermen on the south shore of Nova Scotia sought to enforce these informal codes of conduct when they refused to sell their catch to Philip Carten and instead decided to wait for the arrival of the American fishing fleet. In 1871 merchants in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, enforced these informal codes of conduct when they transshipped American-caught fish in local ports regardless of the protests filed by the officers of the Royal Navy. In 1877 local weir fishermen in Fortune Bay, Newfoundland, enforced these informal codes of conduct when they prohibited American fishermen from catching fish in their own immediate environment, even though those Americans held treaty rights that permitted them to fish. In 1886 fishermen and farmers in and around Digby, Nova Scotia, enforced these informal codes of conduct when they decided to sell baitfish and ice supplies to the David J. Adams despite local and national legislation that defined such acts of trade as smuggling. All of these efforts emerged within the international context of what became known as the “fishery question.” Although those specific words, “fishery question ,” did not appear regularly until the heated years of 1885–1886, the debate was well in place by the 1830s and would last until 1910, when it was settled by the arbitration hearing at The Hague. The question was: what rights or privileges do American fishermen have in the inshore waters and ports of British North American and Canada? Although the Convention of 1818 outlawed Yankee efforts to fish the inshore waters, a heated debate about their right to use local ports as bases of operations in which they would hire crew members, trade with local communities, and purchase supplies—including ice, and most importantly baitfish—continued throughout the period. Due to international treaty stipulations that effectively formalized earlier informal codes of conduct, the debate subsided briefly between 1854 and 1866, and again between 1871 and 1885. In Canada, the diplomatic question came to a conclusion after the adoption by the Dominion government of the modus vivendi of 1886 and its continuation well into the twentieth century. In Newfoundland, the debate remerged during the first decade of the twentieth century, finally coming to some conclusion in 1910. Because the North Atlantic fisheries played a vital role in shaping Anglo-American relations throughout the nineteenth century, the fishery question received extensive documentation in the press, in political debates, in legal records, and in diplomatic correspondence. When we examine the documents related to the political and diplomatic history of the North Atlantic fisheries, we uncover a history far more complex than c o n c l u s i o n | 123 it appeared on the surface. Laborers, merchants, and farmers all played roles in shaping international relations in the border seas of the North Atlantic. Although diplomats created the Convention of 1818, the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, the Treaty of Washington of 1871, the modus vivendi of 1886, and The Hague arbitration decision of 1910, as well as numerous politically created pieces of legislation, the actual business...

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