Expressions of Extraction in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence: Environmental Knowledge, and Henry W. Bayfield, 1827-1856

• In Event: What Do We Get Out of it? Extractivism in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 1759-1856

Abstract

On the night of July 17, 1832, after surveying the Mingan Archipelago, Henry W. Bayfield recorded in his surveying journal that at “night sounded across to Anticosti. ” Bayfield worked up and down the Northern coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence between Anticosti Island and present-day eastern shores of Québec recording both scientific and environmental observations until September 6, 1832. Between July and September Bayfield and his crew encountered calm nights that produced “the most beautiful Auroura Borealis I have ever seen.” They were also exposed to risks presented by human and non-human nature on land and sea, such as powerful gales and vicious swarms of mosquitoes. The St. Lawrence surveys allowed Bayfield to become intimately familiar with the variable conditions that existed both on the water and along the littoral. As Bayfield learned he wrote and reported his findings back to the admiralty in the form of letters and charts. In doing so he was engaged in the extraction, transformation, and concentration of environmental knowledge from the periphery to the imperial center of the Anglo maritime world, namely the British Admiralty. By 1837 Bayfield’s initial surveys of the Gulf of St. Lawrence were published in Sailing Direction for the Gulf and River St. Lawrence. The publication is both a reflection and refraction of social environmental knowledge, collected and framed for settlers located around the world. It is part of a process of extraction, refining, and distribution that favored the production of knowledge for extraction of resources and the proto-globalization of travel. It came with detrimental costs to Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, not only in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but throughout the British Atlantic world.

Authors

• Zachary Tingley, University of New Brunswick

• Joshua MacFadyen, University of Prince Edward Island