“Sportsmen and Pothunters”: Environment, Conservation, and Class in the Fishery of Hamilton Harbour, 1858–1914

Abstract

On 14 January 1866, Hamilton's Fishery Overseer, John William Kerr, caught two men illegally spearing fish in an ice hut on Dundas Marsh, off Burlington Bay.' Refusing to accept a bribe of "good whiskey," the energetic Kerr promptly confiscated their spear and began to return to the city. One of the men, who took the alias "Robert Barney," and who perhaps was enjoying the bravado associated with good whiskey, chased Kerr down and attempted to wrestle the spear from him. But this resident of Corktown, Hamilton's Irish working class district, soon thought better of the idea. Kerr, a former Irish Constable, drew his pistol, aimed, and threatened to shoot "Barney" dead in his tracks. The following day in the quiet of his office, the fish inspector addressed a memo to his superior, the Comrnissioner of Crown Lands, reporting on the incident and requesting to be fur

Nature’s nations: the shared conservation history of Canada and the USA

“…In both countries, rural subsistence and commercial hunters often engaged in conscious political resistance to fish and game regulations through various types of lawbreaking: poaching, trespass on wildlife reserves, and the use of prohibited equipment [59,60,80,81,82,83]. Many historians have characterized the introduction of fish and wildlife conservation regulations in Canada and the United States as the imposition of modern state power on the folkways or traditional knowledge of rural and aboriginal people [14,49,84].…”

(Re-)telling Newfoundland Sealing Masculinity: Narrative and Counter-narrative

“…they followed a "sportsman's creed": that only the adult male animals should be killed in as "clean" a manner as possible. 5 the slaughter of whitecoats in newfoundland with gaffs (long poles with barbed hooks at one end) and, later, hakapiks and guns -although adjudged humane by the scientific community -flew in the face of this bourgeois code of hunting masculinity. In newfoundland, however, sealing represented a form of working-class manliness that was not only acceptable to local bourgeois culture but, with a very few exceptions, also celebrated by it.…”