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nservation can keep in check. Of course, genuinely "necessary food" is not at all in question. I know an old hunter, living at Pokkashoo in summer and St. Augustine in winter, who brought in sixteen caribou last season. But he gave fifteen away to really necessitous families and kept only one for himself. The whale factories at Lark Harbour and Hawke Bay, on the west coast of Newfoundland, were both closed for want of whales. The only one in the Gulf that was working last year was at Seven Islands, on the North Shore, 300 miles below Quebec. I happened to be almost in at the death of the biggest finback ever taken. But, speaking generally, the season was not really prosperous. The station of Seven Islands is worked by Norwegians, who are the most exterminatingly efficient whalers in the world. They worked their own whaleries to exhaustion and raised so much feeling against them among the fishermen that the Norwegian government forbad every factory along the shore. They then invented floating factories, which may still be used in Canadian waters with deadly effect unless we put whaling under conservation. The feeling among the fishermen here is the same as elsewhere, strongly in favour of the whales and strongly against the exterminating kind of whaler, because whales are believed to drive the bait fish close inshore, which is very "handy" for the fishermen. The spring sealing of 1912 was a failure on the Canadian Labrador, as the main "harp" herd was missed by just one day. The whole industry is carried on by Newfoundlanders and men whose vessels take their catch to Newfoundland, because the only working plant is concentrated there. The excessive spring kill greatly depletes the females and young, as it takes place in the whelping season, when the herds are moving north along the off-shore ice; and this depletion naturally spoils not only the Newfoundlanders' permanent industry itself but the much smaller inshore autumn catch by our own Canadian Labradorians, when the herds are moving south. The Canadians along the North Shore and Labrador look upon the invading Newfoundlanders, in this and other pursuits, very much as a farmer looks upon a gipsy whose horse comes grazing in his hayfield. And the analogy sometimes does hold good. When men under a different government, men who do not own a foot of land in Canada, men who do not pay specific taxes for Canadian rights, when these men slaughter seals on inshore ice, use
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