Profile of: Zachary A. Tingley

Award Received: Doctoral Fellowship (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada)

Awarded for the project: Navigating a Marine Commons: The Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Challenges of Maritime Safety, 1815-1867

Faculty: Arts

Department: History & Politics

Supervisors: Dr. Erin Spinney (UNBSJ) & Dr. Joshua MacFadyen (UPEI)

My dissertation will examine the decades from the 1810s to the 1860s when British North Americans first established policies, financing arrangements, and regulatory frameworks for the Gulf of St. Lawrence. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), the Royal Navy was redeployed to peacetime duties, including patrols and hydrographic research in British North American waters. Trade to and from British North America was expanding rapidly, and thousands of immigrants from Britain and Ireland were arriving. Britain also enlarged the colonies’ marine jurisdiction with the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, that restored American fishing rights. The Convention defined the first three nautical miles of inshore waters as the jurisdictional zone of each colony, except Newfoundland and Labrador and around the Magdalen Islands (part of Lower Canada). This expanded jurisdiction gave colonies a direct responsibility for regulating activity in their inshore waters, both to protect resources and to enhance navigational safety. By the late 1820s, intercolonial correspondence increasingly expressed the need for common policies to safely regulate navigation of this resource-rich passage into the largest two British North American colonies, Lower and Upper Canada. By the 1830s, colonies were implementing the first large-scale joint ventures, beginning with the building of lighthouses on St. Paul and Scatarie Islands, followed by a common postal service, and the fishery patrols in the 1840s. “Navigating a Marine Commons” offers a revisioning of the place of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canadian history, as a shared marine space with overlapping jurisdictions, mutual challenges, and common webs of relations. It will focus on the diverse challenges of navigational safety and the interventions of the various levels of government. Intercolonial cooperation on navigational safety became integral in keeping multiple human versions of the Gulf of St. Lawrence shipshape.