Fogo Island: The Outports That Were Offered Money to Disappear

It is the middle of October, and a man is standing in a merchant's office on a Newfoundland island with his cap in his hands, waiting to be told what his summer was worth. He has been fishing since May, up at three most mornings, and so has his wife and so have his children. He knows to the last quintal how much fish he put across that wharf. What he does not know, and has not known all season, is the price - of his catch, or of the flour his family ate while he caught it. Both were set by the man on the other side of the desk, after the work was finished. This is Fogo Island, off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, from the height of the salt cod to the resettlement years: the cod trap and the berth drawn out of a cap, the splitting table and the flake, the ledger and the balance that carried over into next year, a winter's wood hauled home on a slide, and the government offer of the 1960s that asked whole communities to agree, all together, to leave. 📌 What you'll learn • The fishing year in an outport: the cod trap invented in 1866 and the berth it had to stand in, berths drawn by lot among neighbours long before the legal lottery of 1962, the roles at the splitting table - cut-throat, header, splitter, salter - the flake and the four to six weeks of curing, and the quintal of 112 pounds that everything was weighed in • The truck system explained plainly and from both sides: supplies advanced every spring against a catch that did not exist yet, a culler on the merchant's payroll grading the fish, prices for both the goods and the catch set only after the season ended, the deficit carried over to the next year - and why that same ledger was also the only source of credit on a coast with no bank • The household and the winter: gardens built on rock and fertilised with caplin, root cellars, water carried from a well, wood cut in the country and hauled on slides, the dole of six cents a day in the 1930s and the beriberi doctors blamed on it, the one-room denominational school, the midwife, and what was left on the table in March • How resettlement actually worked and what it paid: centralization from 1954 at an average of $301 a family with every household required to sign, the 1965 federal-provincial programme at $1,000 a household head plus $200 a person with a 90 per cent petition threshold lowered to 80 per cent in 1967, where families were allowed to move to, why the totals differ from source to source - and what the Fogo refusal, the co-operative and the boatbuilding did and did not achieve Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources - Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, Memorial University of Newfoundland - Centralization: The Smallwood Years 1949-1972; The Resettlement Program; The Truck System; The Household Economy in Newfoundland and Labrador Outports; 20th-Century Fisheries and Settlement Patterns; Social Changes 1949-1972 - Susan Newhook, Six Degrees of Film, Social, and Cultural History: The Fogo Island Film Project of 1967 and the Newfoundland Renaissance, Acadiensis vol. 39 no. 2 (Summer/Autumn 2010), pp. 48-69 - Robert L. DeWitt, Public Policy and Community Process: The Fogo Case, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1969 - Parks Canada and the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador - Tilting National Historic Site of Canada (2002) and Tilting Registered Heritage District (2003); Bleak House, Fogo, Registered Heritage Structure - National Film Board of Canada - the Fogo Island films of the Challenge for Change programme, directed by Colin Low with the Memorial University Extension Service, 1967; Memorial University Libraries Digital Archives Initiative - and other sources. #HowWeLivedHere #FogoIsland #Newfoundland #Outports #NotreDameBay #JoeBattsArm #Tilting #Resettlement #SaltCod #TruckSystem #CanadianHistory #Genealogy #LocalHistory #FishingHistory #FogoProcess ℹ️ About this video Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember. 🕰️ Historical context The events described took place under legal and social conditions very different from today's. They are presented for historical understanding, without intent to justify or condemn any person, community or group.