5 In February 1832, the New Brunswick House of Assembly allocated £427 to cover the previous summer’s expense of constructing a rescue station on St. Paul Island. A sweeping vision of the province’s marine landscapes guided the assembly’s proactive response to the regional and imperial needs that arose beyond the terrestrial boundaries of the province.¹³ St. Paul Island, in the Cabot Strait between Cape Breton and Newfoundland, lays approximately 250 nautical miles (or 500 kilometres) from the nearest New Brunswick port. Yet the New Brunswick assembly, supported by the lieutenant governor, understood the island as within the marine space over which it had a governance obligation, even if it did not have territorial jurisdiction, and used morally charged language to insist that it – and other colonial governments – were obliged to protect mariners and passengers headed to and from ports in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Reflecting on the stalled initiative for intercolonial cooperation, the lighthouse committee noted that a “longer delay would be attended to with a repetition of the disastrous consequences so greatly felt heretofore . . . on an island so fatal to navigation and the lives of shipwrecked mariners.”¹⁴ Vessels heading to ports along the Northumberland Strait coast of the three Maritime colonies or to Lower Canadian ports put themselves in danger when passing by St. Paul Island. The other routes to enter the Gulf were through the Strait of Canso, with its own hazards, or to sail north around Newfoundland and through the Strait of Belle Isle, which frequently had icebergs in it and was not an option for most mariners.¹⁵ For the assembly in Fredericton, St. Paul Island was an unnecessarily dangerous part of New Brunswick’s marine landscape.

6 Geographically, New Brunswick is the only Maritime province that is truly both maritime and continental; Prince Edward Island is an island, and Nova Scotia is connected to the continent at the narrow Isthmus of Chignecto. New Brunswick, in contrast, has long land borders with Quebec and Maine. It critically linked the maritime and riverine transportation systems of post-1783 British North America and facilitated the year-round intercolonial movement of mail and goods along the Wolastoq/St. John River. During the 18th and 19th centuries, year-round express communications between military officials in Halifax and the governor general in Quebec was on the “Great Road of Communication” via the Wolastoq/St. John River; during the winter, it was the only viable route into the Canadas.¹⁶ To reach the river, travelers first had to safely navigate up the Bay of Fundy, one of the more challenging bodies of water in the world, to the port city of Saint John. New Brunswick’s distinctive geographical position, therefore, made intercolonial cooperation a governmental imperative and not an option.

7 From its earliest sittings, the New Brunswick assembly prioritized navigational safety. Lighthouse commissioners, first appointed in 1788 to oversee the building of Partridge Island lighthouse in the Saint John Harbour (activated in 1792), became a consistent part of the province’s bureaucracy.¹⁷ The French Revolutionary (1792-1802) and Napoleonic (1803-1815) wars discouraged the building of discretionary marine infrastructure, though in 1809, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick activated the Brier Island lighthouse off the southwest corner of Nova Scotia and on the passage into the Bay of Fundy, jointly financing its building and operation.¹⁸ With the arrival of peace in 1815, the assembly began considering new infrastructure projects, including lighthouses, but high initial costs and petitions for lights on both the Bay of Fundy and the Northumberland Strait complicated decisions. By the 1820s, however, burgeoning trade and immigration necessitated an increase in investments in navigational safety.

8 In early 1826, two initiatives for intercolonial cooperation on lighthouses intersected. On 6 February, the New Brunswick assembly resolved to ask Lt. Gov. Howard Douglas to write the governor general in Quebec about the need for lights on “the uninhabited parts of the extensive Coasts, bordering on the Gulf of St. Lawrence.” The resolution’s preamble noted the “importance of maintaining Light-Houses in proper situations, upon the Coasts of Commercial Countries,” but that such establishments had “been too long neglected by the British North American Colonies (Nova Scotia excepted)” and that it had resulted in people “prematurely consigned to a watery grave” or, “having escaped from the vessels in which they have been wrecked,” dying on “the shores of the uninhabited parts of the extensive Coasts.” Within a day Douglas responded to the assembly’s resolution, reporting back on communications with the governor general and the lieutenant governors of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island regarding joint building of lighthouses as well as “an alteration in the mode of collecting duties on vessels passing Cranberry Island in the Gut of Canso” – one of three routes into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.¹⁹

9 In 1822, Nova Scotia activated the Cranberry Island lighthouse on the Atlantic edge of Chedabucto Bay leading into the Strait of Canso. For residents of Prince Edward Island, the strait was the shortest route between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic. The Nova Scotia assembly set the light duties at 4d (pence) per ton for provincial vessels, 6d per ton for non-provincial vessels, and 20s (shilling) per year for Nova Scotia-owned coasting vessels. Light duties on the vessels of Islanders were all collected at 6d per ton, with no annual maximum and no distinction between ocean-going vessels that might pass the lighthouse two times a year and coasting vessels that might pass it multiple times.²⁰ In 1825 the Prince Edward Island assembly discussed three years of grievances against Nova Scotia’s management of Cranberry Island Lighthouse and passed ten resolutions detailing its concerns: the light duties were “an illegal exaction on property,” were “excessive,” and were higher than “light dues throughout the British and Irish Channels.” The PEI assembly contended that the Gut of Canso should “of right [be] free and open to all his Majesty’s subjects for the purpose of Navigation, without tax or impediment.” In the ninth resolution, the assembly requested that Prince Edward Island’s lieutenant governor contact Nova Scotia’s lieutenant governor to negotiate a solution. Should those negotiations prove unsatisfactory, the tenth resolution asked the lieutenant governor to contact New Brunswick’s lieutenant governor for support, which he did.²¹

10 In principle, New Brunswick supported light duties. A 1788 statute allowed for collecting light duties in Saint John harbour to finance the Partridge Island lighthouse; a 1793 amendment clarified the definition of coasting vessels. Initially, New Brunswick vessels paid 2d per ton and out-of-province vessels 4d per ton, but, in 1823, the assembly replaced the 1788 statute so that duties would “be equalized upon all Vessels, whether belonging to the Port of Saint John, or any other place, British or Foreign,” making the light duty in Saint John 3d per ton for all large vessels and 10s per year for coasting vessels – a significant public statement about the need for intercolonial cooperation and equity. When Lt. Gov. Douglas approached the New Brunswick assembly with Prince Edward Island’s concerns, the assembly would not support the contention that light duties were illegal; but its own legislation clearly signalled that colonial lighthouses should be maintained with an equitable system of fees.²² In the assembly’s act to assure equitable light duties regardless of a vessel’s home port, we can see an awareness that regulations pertaining to marine space would require principles distinct from those applying to terrestrial space.

11 Nova Scotia’s practices for collecting light duties were susceptible to abuse, particularly at relatively remote lighthouses. Initially, Nova Scotia collected light duties for Sambro Island lighthouse at the entrance to Halifax Harbour (1758) and Shelburne Harbour lighthouse (1788) when ships departed and not when they arrived as was more customary. To address ships leaving without paying their light duties, the Nova Scotia assembly passed legislation in 1793 for the lieutenant governor “to appointment fit and proper persons Collectors of the said duties in the several ports, harbours, creeks and rivers in this Province” with the power “to seize and take such ship or vessel . . . and carry the same to the port nearest,” anywhere on the coast “southward and westward of Cape Canso.” The captured vessel would be turned over to a custom’s official and a five-pound fine, the light duty, and “all reasonable expenses” exacted. Two years later, the assembly mandated that light duties be collected when vessels arrived in Halifax or Shelburne; but the 1793 legislation remained active and applied to the collection of duties for the Cranberry Island lighthouse where there was no large harbour at which duties could be collected.²³ Instead, collectors could stop vessels anywhere and demand the light duties. A Nova Scotia legislative committee reported “that Ships, Foreign, Domestic, and European, passing through the Gut of Canso, have been much harassed.” Collectors would board vessels, and if the master had no cash for light duties the collector would impound a vessel’s equipment, such as sails, needed for transatlantic voyages. Shipping expenses were often handled on credit, and ship “masters being unprovided with Money have been frequently forced to give orders on individuals, many of which remain unpaid.” Not only did the collection process create intercolonial tensions, the committee reported that “the expenses of collection swallow up every thing – little or nothing goes to the general fund.” It recommended that the assembly accept the recommendation of the lieutenant governors of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, Howard Douglas and John Ready respectively, that each colony contribute a set amount and that vessels only pay light duties “at their respective Ports of destination.”²⁴

12 On 8 February 1826, Lt. Gov. Douglas reported to the New Brunswick assembly that he and Lt. Gov. Ready advised Nova Scotia to alter “the mode of collecting duties on vessels passing Cranberry Island.” The assembly agreed to provide a lump sum, determined by Douglas at £120 annually, “towards the support of the Light-House on Cranberry Island.” Sharing the financing of this lighthouse complemented its larger objective to improve navigational safety through intercolonial cooperation. By that date the assembly understood that not all lighthouses could be funded through light duties, but instead needed assembly appropriations and intercolonial cooperation. New Brunswickers, however, did not anticipate that once the colonies agreed on a mechanism for financing the Cranberry Island lighthouse their initiatives to build other lighthouses would stall for a decade. At the same time, it became clear that Nova Scotians did not fully appreciate the differential and collaborative financing of lighthouses. Nova Scotia collectors stopped at least one New Brunswick vessel for Cranberry Island light duties, prompting New Brunswick to shift resources into the rescue station on St. Paul Island, suspend payments for Cranberry Island (though they continued joint support for Brier Island), and increase the moral pressure for other colonies to cooperate on investing in safe navigation into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.²⁵

13 The Cranberry Island lighthouse played a critical role in the early development of polycentric governance for safe navigation in British North America. The politics that played out set three colonial governments on a path of intercolonial dialogue that was unlike anything that had come before. Bilateral colonial agreements, such as for the Brier Island lighthouse, would not address the challenges that passage into the Gulf of St. Lawrence posed. As the governments of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia came to terms with the magnitude of the challenge in the Gulf, New Brunswick led the way as it supported Prince Edward Island with calls for regional management of common responsibilities. Central to this dialogue was the moral language that had been integrated into the political discourse of New Brunswick after the construction of a rescue station at St. Paul’s Island: mitigating known and predictable dangers was an obligation of government.

14 In the century after the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), more than 12 million people from Britain and Ireland left for British settler colonies in North America, the Antipodes, and Southern Africa or for the United States – a movement of people that dwarfed the approximately 1.2 million who had left in the prior two centuries.²⁶ In absolute numbers, the sheer scale of migration meant more ships on the high seas and more shipwrecks and, in turn, pressure for enhanced navigational safety. Over the early modern era (ca. 1500-1800), European governments undertook diverse initiatives to improve maritime travel, from the decades-long search to find a practical way to measure longitude to dietary requirements to keep mariners healthy on long voyages to large government projects to chart coastlines.²⁷

15 In North America, colonists financed lighthouses.²⁸ Nova Scotia’s first assembly in 1758 appropriated £1,000 to build a lighthouse on Sambro Island in the entrance to Halifax Harbour, and the next year authorized the collection of light duties for its maintenance. After Loyalists settled Shelburne, the Nova Scotia assembly allocated £500 in 1786 and 1788 to build a lighthouse on Port Roseway.²⁹ During those same years, New Brunswick built its first lighthouse on Partridge Island at the entrance into Saint John Harbour. The pressing navigational challenge for Quebec/Lower Canada was safe passage on the St. Lawrence River. In 1788, the executive council approved an ordinance requiring ships to hire a pilot at Île du Bic when sailing up the river, or in Quebec when sailing down river. In 1805 Lower Canada institutionalized navigational safety by creating a Quebec Trinity House, modeled on the English corporation chartered as a mariners’ charity in 1514. From licensing pilots to placing buoys to mark shipping lanes, Trinity House in England slowly assumed oversight, if not ownership, of diverse array of navigational concerns, including lighthouses, building its first one in 1609.³⁰

16 During the first decade of the 19th century, British North Americans began addressing safety on remote parts of their marine landscapes and not just on the harbours settled by colonists. In 1801, Nova Scotia built and staffed a rescue station on Sable Island, which had long been a shipping hazard for vessels heading to and from Europe. As well, building coastal lighthouses to mark dangerous sections of sparsely settled coasts, as distinct from harbour lighthouses at the entrances to major ports, emerged as a new priority. In the southeastern waters of the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick jointly financed the Brier Island lighthouse, which was activated in 1809. That same year Lower Canada activated a lighthouse on Île-Verte on the lower St. Lawrence River, marking a major hazard on the route to Quebec and signalling hazards to mariners as they sailed up a narrowing river. Building and maintaining these remote coastal lighthouses posed new challenges: some geographical, some technological, and some jurisdictional.³¹

17 Geographically, coastal lighthouses were often sited on remote islands, promontories, or headlands – typically far from a safe anchorage and a settled harbour. Unlike harbour lights that guided mariners to port, coastal lights warned mariners to stay out at sea away from treacherous shores. These expensive establishments were difficult to construct and required careful management to assure that the people who lived and worked at them were adequately supplied with provisions, stores, and increasingly life-saving provisions and equipment in the event of wrecks; hiring vessels and crews to make regular resupply trips became part of lighthouse and rescue station maintenance. As well, remoteness made collection of light duties difficult if not impossible. Most coastal lights were not associated with a particular port of call, but instead served ships sailing through dangerous waters and headed to distant ports. The intercolonial negotiations in the 1820s over the financing for the Cranberry Island lighthouse, whether through collection of light duties or an agreed-upon contribution by colonial governments, was largely because it was a remote coastal lighthouse and not a harbour lighthouse, and few precedents existed for how best to pay for their maintenance.

18 Coastal lights also posed technological challenges: they needed powerful lights that were visible far out at sea to warn mariners away from dangerous shores, and those lights were sited at locations needing sophisticated engineering to access and build. During the 18th century skilled glassmakers and scientists experimented with new ways of refracting and reflecting light, using prisms and mirrors to enhance illumination. In 1811 Napoleon established the French Commission des phares and hired scientists to work on illumination, especially on how to make lights visible from further away. By 1820, a young French scientist, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, had created a superior light with dozens of carefully mounted prisms, rather than reflectors, that would refract and thereby compound the light. By comparison with older lights, these new ones were expensive and some came with mountings that allowed them to rotate adding yet another major expense. The growing sophistication of illumination also allowed for differentiation among lights, so that within a few years mariners would carry manuals describing the height of lights, whether they rotated or were stationary, and the timing of their flashes.³²

19 These geographical and technological challenges meant coastal lights posed new jurisdictional quandaries: they were expensive to build, requiring costly technology and engineering expertise; they were remote and needed assured delivery of supplies so that the staff and their families could survive; and the ports of call that benefitted from coastal lighthouses were often distant and in another jurisdiction from the actual location of the lighthouse. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island had already begun to adjust to some of these challenges. Two of the first coastal lights in British North America involved intercolonial cooperation: Brier Island in the Bay of Fundy and Cranberry Island near the Atlantic edge of Chedabucto Bay. While the colonies agreed to workable forms of collaboration for these two establishments, agreeing on how to build and maintain a lighthouse on St. Paul Island was far more difficult. The island was relatively distant from any sizeable port in Nova Scotia; Sydney, Cape Breton was approximately 150 kilometers to the south. The vessels that would benefit from the lighthouse(s) were headed primarily to ports in Lower Canada and New Brunswick, not Nova Scotia, and the establishment would require a staffed and provisioned humane, or rescue, station. How were duties to be collected to support lights on this remote coast? Was another financial mechanism needed? And what was the responsibility of the imperial government?

20 It took a decade for the British North American colonies and the imperial government to negotiate the jurisdictional and financial challenges that coastal lights posed and to agree on a system of shared governance that we describe as polycentric. From the beginning, New Brunswick advocated for intercolonial cooperation and financing based on proportional utility, while Nova Scotia and Lower Canada more frequently directed their concerns to the imperial government for resolution. The New Brunswick assembly avoided appealing directly to the imperial government until 1836, and only then after it had agreed to pay for lighthouse establishments on St. Paul and Scatarie. The history of these negotiations and the slow convergence towards a polycentric solution captures the challenges of finding interjurisdictional solutions to new infrastructure needs and the marine commons.

21 In 1829 Governor General James Kempt wrote Newfoundland’s governor, Thomas Cochrane, to ask that colony to contribute to building lighthouses on Cape Ray, on the island’s southwest tip on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and on St. Paul Island 20 leagues across from Cape Ray, which formed “the narrowest part of the channel leading between to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.” The Lower Canadian assembly, Kempt explained, was considering lights on “the East and West Ends of the Island of Anticosti and at Point Des-Montes,” which were in Lower Canada, but also thought lights were needed on Cape Ray and St. Paul Island, and that Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island should commit to their building and upkeep. Significantly, Kempt did not name Nova Scotia even though St. Paul Island was under its jurisdiction. Cochrane declined and explained that “trifling” few Newfoundland mariners sailed near Cape Ray while 600 vessels per year entered St. John’s Harbour on Newfoundland’s Atlantic-facing coast, which still lacked a lighthouse. He acknowledged “the great advantage that will arise to the commerce of St. Lawrence” from a lighthouse on Cape Ray, but it would serve the needs of other parts of British North America, not Newfoundland, and thus the costs should not be born by Newfoundlanders.³³

22 The Kempt-Cochrane correspondence captures the problem of using a terrestrial characteristic – Cape Ray as Newfoundland territory – as a constant rather than a variable factor in addressing navigational safety along sparsely settled coastlines and in a body of water as large and as heavily trafficked as the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The people who most frequently came ashore on the Gulf coasts of Newfoundland were French and American fishers, and their financial contributions to navigational safety were negligible. Ships sailing past Cape Ray to ports in Lower Canada and New Brunswick or eastward back into the Atlantic would derive far more advantage from a lighthouse there than would year-round British subjects residing in Newfoundland who lived overwhelmingly on Atlantic-facing coasts; lighting the Gulf littoral would not benefit them. In negotiating how best to finance navigational infrastructure, terrestrial jurisdiction became a variable, not a constant, to be weighed against other variables, such as who benefitted. In 1838 the Colonial Office in London, Trinity House in Deptford, England, the Admiralty, and the Newfoundland government again conferred on whether a lighthouse should be built on Cape Ray at the same time the St. Paul lighthouses were being built but decided against it. In the 1870s the Dominion of Canada agreed to contribute to an imperially financed lighthouse at Cape Ray, a recognition of the benefits accruing to Canadians and the empire. But even within a single imperial system, negotiations could take years; it took over four decades, for instance, to get a lighthouse at Cape Ray largely because the vast majority of beneficiaries of this lighthouse would never stop in Newfoundland.³⁴

23 One of the earliest transatlantic (as distinct from intercolonial) interventions in sharing the costs of navigational safety came in 1825 from Lt. Gov. James Kempt of Nova Scotia (1820-1828), when he wrote the Colonial Office concerning support for the Sable Island rescue station – the first in British North America. A sliver of sand approximately 43 kilometers long and only 1.2 kilometers at its widest point, Sable Island lays 170 kilometers southeast of Nova Scotia and was a notorious shipping hazard on the route between North America and Europe. In 1801, Nova Scotia inaugurated the rescue station and kept it stockpiled with provisions to feed 300 people for up to six months at a cost of approximately £400 per year. The primary beneficiaries were British subjects from other jurisdictions or foreigners, especially Americans, and not Nova Scotians. The station, Kempt opined, should “be considered a fit subject for the protection of His Majesty’s Government.” Kempt’s advocacy persuaded the imperial Treasury to support the station at £400 per year if Nova Scotia contributed an equivalent amount, an arrangement honoured until 1832, when the Treasury began reviewing all colonial funding commitments and cancelled it. The Sable Island rescue station is another case when territorial jurisdiction was challenged as the primary variable for assessing financial responsibility.³⁵ A decade later imperial officials could finally articulate the logic of why the British Treasury should help finance remote marine establishments. As Lord Glenelg noted in 1835 when he informed the colonies of the Treasury’s decision to fund the building of lighthouses on St. Paul and Scatarie Islands, “their Lordships consider [their building] as of national [i.e., British imperial] rather than of local [i.e., a provincial] interest.”³⁶ Unlike harbour lighthouses, which were unequivocally local, coastal lighthouses and rescue stations served diverse and far-flung constituencies, and thus their financing did not conform to conventional, land-based jurisdictional arrangements.

24 In 1826, when the New Brunswick assembly and lieutenant governor began reaching out to other colonies about building a lighthouse on St. Paul Island, they factored utility, responsibility, benefits, and costs into their plans. Lower Canada and New Brunswick, with Prince Edward Island a distant third, needed the St. Paul lighthouse the most. Although the island was Nova Scotia territory, a lighthouse there would offer little benefit to that colony and thus, in New Brunswick’s estimation, its financial responsibility should be less if any at all. This initial outreach was interrupted by tensions over collection of light duties for the Cranberry Island lighthouse and the New Brunswick assembly did not revisit it until 1829, when it unanimously resolved that a lighthouse on St. Paul Island “is absolutely necessary for the safety of Vessels sailing into or out of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence “and that the “Governments of Canada and Prince Edward Island” should join New Brunswick in providing “equitable” financial support for it.³⁷

25 By the late 1820s, navigational safety had become a pressing enough problem that multiple governmental bodies commissioned expeditions to assay options for lighthouses on the main route into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In 1829, Rear-Admiral Sir Charles Ogle, commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy’s North American Station, sent J.W. Jones, Master of HM Sloop Columbine, to assess possible sites on the Cabot Strait. Jones reported that St. Paul Island was “the most advantageous place . . . in or about this great thoroughfare,” but also detailed the challenges. The NW side of the island has a cove and “a small Creek large enough for a Line of Battle Ship’s Launch (10 or 12 tons) to lay well sheltered and Stores could be landed whenever a Vessel could show herself off this side of the Island.” Much of the island has “perpendicular” or ironbound cliffs that make landings impossible. An admiralty mate on the expedition, “Mr Journey,” took readings of the longitude and latitude of St. Paul Island, which Jones compared to those “laid down on all the Charts at present in use,” and determined the latter were “inaccurate” and contributed to the “many Shipwrecks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the South Coast of Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island, as well as upon the Island itself.”³⁸

26 Shortly after the Royal Navy’s expedition, the Lower Canadian government, supported by Trinity House Quebec, undertook its own assessment of St. Paul Island by sending a group in the summer of 1830 after the Lower Canadian assembly voted £2,000 towards a lighthouse if an agreement could be reached with the other colonies. The expedition was led by Robert Young, the head of the pilots, and John Adams, an architect, and included three representatives from New Brunswick as well as miners to assess whether granite could be quarried on the island. Young and Adams’s report included a detailed list of the materials needed to build a lighthouse with living quarters and a rescue station, estimated at a cost of approximately £2,000.³⁹ New Brunswick’s lighthouse committee disagreed with Young and Adams’s recommendation that a single lighthouse be built on the island’s highest point, instead recommending two lights at lower elevations. New Brunswick estimated the total cost to build the two lighthouses at £3,500, and that Lower Canada should pay two-thirds of it based on the number of vessels sailing for destinations in that colony.⁴⁰

27 In 1832, merchants of the City of London appealed to the Admiralty to inquire into lighthouses in British North America. It solicited reports from different colonies and commissioned another survey of the Gulf of St. Lawrence by the Admiralty’s Chief Hydrographer Francis Beaufort. In his 1834 report, Beaufort described the challenges of siting a lighthouse on St. Paul Island given the fogs that frequently encircled it. Some people recommended a light on the highest point at 440 feet above the sea, while others recommended a low light, and still others recommended two lights. In his estimation, a light was necessary on St. Paul while “a second light is wanted on Scatarie Island . . . [where] numberless wrecks [are] Scattered on the neighbouring Shore.” These lights should be of the best quality, with St. Paul’s “of the best and strongest power and . . . on the revolving principle,” and Scatarie could be of similar quality but “distinguished either by two lights or by an apparatus for short flashes or intermissions.” Beaufort considered recommending a light on the Magdalen Islands, but thought that those islands could best be avoided with soundings. He did advise that a light on the northwest corner of Prince Edward Island would be “highly useful.” Beaufort also opined on the debate over who should fund these lights – the colonies or the imperial government: given the importance of the route, he felt it “may be fairly considered as coming within the protective aid of the Mother Country, not only in contributing to the expense of erecting but in enacting some means for their support.”⁴¹

28 By 1831 New Brunswick’s lighthouse committee had grown frustrated at the delays, noting in its report to the assembly that “the necessity for this establishment has long been evident” and “deplored that so much delay has arisen.” That summer Lt. Gov. Archibald Campbell authorized the expedition to St. Paul Island, which went prepared to build a rescue station as it likely benefitted from the detailed building recommendations in Young and Adams’s report. During the 1832 legislative session, Campbell announced that a rescue station had been built and urged the assembly to “persevere in directing your attention to works of this description; works which are as beneficial to Commerce, as they are honorable to Humanity.”⁴² The assembly needed no urging, but Campbell’s strong affirmation surely provided executive cover for the decision to build on another colony’s territory without clear permission to do so.

29 Colonists increasingly challenged imperial officials about the empire’s responsibility to contribute to the costs of navigational safety in North America, especially after Parliament and the Treasury began reducing imperial contributions to colonial budgets in the early 1830s. When they restructured imperial contributions to Nova Scotia’s budget in 1832, they eliminated the £400 contribution to support the Sable Island Rescue Station that James Kempt had negotiated in 1825. From the perspective of Nova Scotia, it signalled an abdication of imperial responsibility for the safety of subjects and in 1834 the assembly sent an impassioned petition to King William IV including “a bare enumeration” of the ten vessels that shipwrecked on Cape Breton in the last year, eight with British owners. Three ships carried 255, 143, and 114 people, respectively, most of them poor immigrants intending to restart their lives in British North America. Shipwrecks placed a huge strain on both “private charity” and the public treasury in Nova Scotia. During the 19th century, public assistance costs were generally charged to the home society; the petition noted that victims of shipwrecks in British-owned vessels were still British subjects from Britain and the cost of their care should not be born entirely by Nova Scotia. To expose “British subjects . . . to the Horrors and Dangers of Famine and Shipwreck upon the fatal coast of Cape Breton” when lighthouses could mitigate the dangers taxed the assembly’s confidence that the imperial government had any sense of shared responsibility with subjects in British North America.⁴³

30 On 4 November 1835, Lord Glenelg, the secretary of state for the colonies, wrote to the governors of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Lower Canada to inform them that the Lords of the Treasury, after seeking “the advice of scientific persons experienced in the navigation” of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and impressed by Nova Scotia’s petition, including details on the previous year’s shipwrecks, finally recognized that that “if Light Houses were erected upon the Islands of Scatterie and Saint Paul, off the coast of Cape Breton, many of the Shipwrecks which now occur might be prevented.” They also opined that the issues were of “national rather than of local interest,” and therefore would ask Parliament for funds to build the lighthouses “provided that the Colonies, whose trade is to be benefitted by this measure, will engage to defray the expenses of their future maintenance.” The Treasury stipulated that once built, they should be placed under the “management of the Board for the direction of such matters, which already exists in Nova Scotia,” adhering to a conventional territorial allocation of administrative responsibility. Glenelg, however, had not confirmed with Nova Scotia that it would be agreeable to this plan, “because were I to await a Report from Nova Scotia, it would be impossible to submit it to those bodies during their approaching [legislative] Sessions.” After years of equivocation, addressing navigational safety in the Gulf of St. Lawrence had suddenly become a pressing priority for the Colonial Office.⁴⁴

31 New Brunswick’s assembly applauded the decision, but after watching earlier initiatives falter for lack of financially feasible plans it tasked its lighthouse committee with outlining different options, initially around some variation of New Brunswick and Lower Canada sharing the maintenance of a lighthouse on St. Paul Island and Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island sharing the maintenance of a lighthouse on Scatarie Island. When the committee consulted Nova Scotia, however, that colony opined that given the location of both islands within its jurisdiction, and given Glenelg and the Treasury’s stipulations, it needed to be involved in maintaining lighthouses on both islands. Nova Scotia estimated that the establishments proposed by the British would cost a total of approximately £1000 per year to staff and supply, and that Lower Canada should pay £500 of it and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia would each pay £250. The New Brunswick assembly thought the £1000 estimate was high, but it was done quibbling over details and voted to commit those funds.⁴⁵ It remained concerned, however, that after a decade of Lower Canada rebuffing its overtures for cooperation on lighting the Gulf littoral that it might rebuff the imperial overture as well, and delays would again ensue. To forestall that possibility, it asked William Crane and L.A. Wilmot, its delegation in London, to negotiate the colony’s finances and to tell Glenelg that should colonial negotiations break down “we are authorised to state that New-Brunswick will make provision for the support and maintenance of the Light Houses on Saint Paul’s.”⁴⁶

32 Their concern was finally misplaced. All four colonies accepted the offer by the Colonial Office and Treasury, and in August 1836 they sent commissioners to meet in Chatham, New Brunswick, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to negotiate the conditions of their cooperation. In the first half of the carefully composed document that the commissioners called an “Award,” they summarized “His Majesty’s Government’s” offer to finance the building of the lighthouses, their meeting “for the purpose of obtaining a Commission of Arbitration appointed by them with power of adopting a final award as to the site, structure and appointment of the annual expence of such Light Houses; or any arrangement better adapted to the exigencies of the case” as well as the authorization each commissioner had received to act on behalf of their respective colony. The second half of the award summarizes five points about what the commission agreed needed to be build and the financial commitment of each colony for the long-term maintenance of the facilities: Lower Canada, £500; New Brunswick, £250; Nova Scotia, £250; and Prince Edward Island, £30. Those payments were to be made by 1 July of every year.⁴⁷

33 Among the most striking details in the award are the summaries of what “His Majesty’s Government” would be building and the terms of maintenance. The commission agreed that three, not two, lighthouses would be built, two on St. Paul and one on Scatarie. The New Brunswick delegation had surely been the one to press for two lighthouses “at the extreme points so as to be conspicuous on entering and leaving the Gulf of St. Lawrence.” The 1830 report from the Lower Canadian team sent to St. Paul recommended a single lighthouse at the highest point. New Brunswick’s lighthouse commissioners had opposed that advice, which contributed to their decision to build the rescue station in 1831. The intervening five years of first-hand experience on the island surely added weight to their advocacy for two lighthouses. The commission agreed on combined “Light Houses and Humane Establishments” – in other words with rescue stations – and they committed their respective colonies to “a continual supply of Provisions, Clothing, Bedding, Fuel &c for the use and assistance of ship wrecked persons.” Mindful of the environment, they stipulated that the “Keeper’s Houses, Stores or Warehouses” were to be built “detached from the Light Houses,” a protection in the event of fire, and with “frost proof Cellars to preserve provisions for the relief of Ship wrecked persons.” St. Paul would have a superintendent and six employees and Scatarie a superintendent and three employees, not counting wives and children, and would be staffed year-round, a long-term commitment by the four colonies that Nova Scotia as the administering government could not reduce.⁴⁸

34 Despite the agreement, it would take three seasons – the summers of 1837, 1838, and 1839 – for lighthouses to be built. Two were activated in December 1839, one on St. Paul, one on Scatarie; the light in the third was installed and activated in 1840. Nova Scotia oversaw construction, while the Colonial Office deputized Trinity House in England to order the lights and assure their delivery. The Treasury estimated the cost at £8000 but there were cost overruns, both in Nova Scotia’s expenses and in the cost of the lamps that Trinity House contracted to be built. Calls for explanations ensued. The documentary record indicates that members of Parliament questioned whether there was sufficient shipping to warrant the expense; in 1840 the House of Commons published an 85-page pamphlet listing all the ships that sailed between ports in British North America and Britain and Ireland in the years 1836, 1837, and 1838. More than 2,000 ships per year, employing over 25,000 persons, sailed between the North American colonies and Britain, and approximately 75 per cent of those vessels originated from or sailed to ports in the Gulf of St. Lawrence or the St. Lawrence River.⁴⁹ Since the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the Gulf of St. Lawrence had quietly assumed not just an important role in the maritime world of Britain but a dominant one in North America. Lighthouses on the route into and out of the Gulf were not acts of excessive precaution, but rather a humanitarian and commercial imperative.

35 The intercolonial negotiations for lighthouses on the passage into the Gulf of Lawrence stretched more than a decade and involved four colonial governments and various offices of the imperial government including the Colonial Office, the Treasury, Parliament, the Admiralty, and Trinity House. They also had relevance for other shared concerns, including an intercolonial postal service and regulations to control American depredations in the Gulf fisheries.⁵⁰ The prominence of the Maritime colonies, particularly New Brunswick, in pushing for cooperation on maritime navigational safety and in arguing in terms of a humanitarian imperative suggests more proactive and assertive political cultures than is conventionally recognized. Significantly, New Brunswick seldom appealed directly to the imperial government by comparison with Nova Scotia and Lower Canada but, unlike those colonies, it did not host a large imperial presence like the North America station of the Royal Navy in Halifax or the Office of the Governor General in Quebec. Rather, it tended to press for intercolonial solutions in which imperial contributions and control were less significant.

36 Constitutional constraints made a polycentric governing arrangement preferable to a top down and centralized imperial solution. In its 1834 petition to the king the Nova Scotia assembly suggested that Parliament in Westminster might pass an act to levy an imperial light duty on shipping into British North America, recognizing that would be “an infringement of the Constitutional Right” that Parliament could not levy duties in the colonies as guaranteed by the 1778 Taxation of the Colonies Act. But amending that act would also require amending the 1791 Constitutional Act that had divided Quebec into Lower and Upper Canada because Parliament reconfirmed the 1778 act in that legislation. The implied colonial powers in the 1778 act, moreover, allowed the colonies to police inshore waters against American fishing incursions.⁵¹ The Treasury declined “to approve of the suggestion” that Parliament pass legislation for a light duty “to be levied either in the Ports of the Colonies concerned or on shipping clearing from British Ports for those Colonies.”⁵² This recommendation for a centralized imperial solution would have also created complications with collecting the light duties and then negotiating their distribution.

37 This study highlights the importance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canadian history.⁵³ The paucity of scholarship on it is surprising, and we hope that this article will encourage more research. The size, geography, and varied use of the Gulf made interjurisdictional cooperation a necessity, and yet British North Americans had no precedents for framing policies and allocating financial responsibility when territorial jurisdictions did not line up neatly with the regulation and governance of marine space. British North Americans gradually crafted a set of reference points and principles to be incorporated into any solution. A repeated observation in the legislative resolutions, official reports, and transatlantic correspondence was that Nova Scotia should not have to pay the costs of building and maintaining lighthouses just because some islands and rugged coastlines lay within its terrestrial jurisdiction. The principle that emerged and that was adopted by all the colonies was as follows: when it came to responsibility for marine space and safe navigation, contiguous territorial jurisdiction does not always equate with financial responsibility and thus other jurisdictions should also assume responsibility. The primary beneficiaries of the St. Paul and Scatarie island lighthouses would be mariners and passengers headed to ports in the colonies of New Brunswick and Lower Canada and the thousands of British merchants and investors whose ships sailed through the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The governance, regulation, and financing of navigational safety needed a “national” response, while the administration of the lighthouses and rescue stations needed to be “local” in the parlance of the time. That arrangement would require new governing principles, ones that could honour colonial constitutions and financial equity. Quibbling over finances when humanitarian crises literally washed ashore with distressing frequency risked making ethics part of the flotsam and jetsam of economic expansion.⁵⁴

38 These early coastal lighthouse establishments also offer some theoretical observations about the nature of marine commons, both natural and built, and the tailoring of polycentric governance solutions to suit diverse challenges and variables. First, acknowledging that shared responsibility might be the most effective solution to a common problem could often take a long time. Almost decade separated New Brunswick’s first invitation to the other colonies to cooperate on building a lighthouse on St. Paul Island (1826) and Lord Glenelg’s letter advising four colonies that the Treasury had agreed to ask Parliament for funds (1835), and it took another four years to get the lighthouses built (1839). Polycentric governing solutions, by definition, involve multiple perspectives and multiple sets of priorities. For example, in Lower Canada the assembly balanced whether to invest in safe navigation on the St. Lawrence River or in the Gulf; the river was provincial jurisdiction and did not require intercolonial negotiations, while the Gulf was multi-jurisdictional. Prioritizing infrastructure on the river could justify ignoring needs in the Gulf. Moreover, jurisdictions are never equal in power and influence, and Nova Scotia and Lower Canada could each claim greater importance than New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island because they hosted imperial bureaucracies. But as Prince Edward Island realized in 1826, appealing to New Brunswick was a way to solve a problem with Nova Scotia over Cranberry Island. New Brunswick’s avoidance of direct appeals to the imperial government was a recognition that imperial solutions would likely favour Lower Canada or Nova Scotia.⁵⁵ To enhance its negotiating power, it tended to pursue intercolonial solutions.

39 Polycentric solutions highlight the challenges and necessity of jurisdictions with differing forms and expressions of power collaborating. St. Paul Island was within Nova Scotia’s territorial jurisdiction and thus that colony was technically responsible for it. It had less need for a lighthouse there than did New Brunswick and Lower Canada, but it was unwilling to relinquish control to New Brunswick or Lower Canada despite repeated suggestions by New Brunswick that it would join with Lower Canada to build and maintain a lighthouse on St. Paul Island while Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island could build and maintain one on Scatarie. That proposal, which New Brunswick fielded at least twice, found no purchase with the other colonies, probably because it involved a vision of maritime space that would put St. Paul Island within the jurisdictional sphere of other colonies. Restructuring territorial jurisdictions, even for a single uninhabited island, seemed a step too far. Ultimately, the humanitarian imperative provided both the critical impetus to act and a guide in decision-making. At the moment a shipwreck happens, the imperative for people in situ is conventionally to save lives and salvage property; jurisdictional and financial issues are reflexively suspended. That humanitarian imperative compelled New Brunswick to build a rescue or humane station on Nova Scotia territory in 1831, and three decades earlier for Nova Scotia to build one on Sable Island, even though Nova Scotia ships seldom wrecked on the island. When the imperial government recognized the humanitarian imperative, it became possible to work back to polycentric governance so as to develop new governing practices were appropriate for shared marine space.

40 The development of a polycentric governance system three decades prior to Canadian Confederation raises important questions about the motivations behind initiatives for the political union both in the Maritimes and in the Canadas. Were New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island hesitant about a union with the Canadas because of their respective histories? Were challenges in the Gulf of St. Lawrence more important than challenges in the Canadas? Was John A. Macdonald’s presentation of a unified dominion predicated on a Canadian dislike for the polycentric governance system that emerged three decades earlier? While the answers to these questions require further research, what is clear is that an entrenched form of polycentric governance, based on the shared management of the Gulf of St. Lawrence as a marine commons existed for over three decades before the British North America Act, 1867 was signed. Scholars have tended to look continentally for evidence related to Canadian Confederation, yet early expressions of polycentric governance suggest we might better begin by looking back to the sea.