A Gentleman in the Outports: Gobineau and Newfoundland

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Sir Wilfred
Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Michael Wilkshire has edited and translated the writings of a French
diplomat who was posted to North America in 1859 as part of an
Anglo-French commission to investigate problems arising out of French
fishing rights in Newfoundland. In his travels, Joseph Arthur de
Gobineau stopped at the French island of St. Pierre, Sydney and Halifax
in Nova Scotia, western and northern Newfoundland, and St. John’s. He
commented frequently, if not always perceptively, on the communities he
visited, and it is this that gives A Gentleman in the Outports its
value. De Gobineau reveals his own biases (not just anglophobic ones but
also prejudices against North America). Social historians of
19th-century Newfoundland will be interested in de Gobineau’s
description of the truck economy, winter housing, the informal marriages
that were necessary in communities that lacked benefit of clergy, and
the interdependent relationship of English and French fishers in western
Newfoundland that enabled both to thrive.

De Gobineau also reveals his own remarkable ignorance of things a
person in his position should have been quite knowledgeable about. His
version of the sequence of events by which the French empire in North
America was lost is remarkable for its distortions. The same is true for
his feeble grasp of the intricacies and details of the several treaties
that defined French fishing rights in Newfoundland. De Gobineau’s
powers of the pen were not great, though he wrote Voyage а Terre-Neuve
to make some money out of his travels.

Wilkshire also includes some of the diplomatic correspondence
associated with de Gobineau’s mission, as well as a mediocre short
story by de Gobineau that is set largely in western Newfoundland and
therefore reasserts some of de Gobineau’s impressions. Together these
writings provide us with useful glimpses of the fishing societies and
economies of St. Pierre and Newfoundland, and complement the writings of
other 19th-century commentators like Edward Wix and Joseph Jukes.