Travelling Hopefully - French Language Edition

The next day in St Johns was glorious.  The sky was clear, the sun was shining and even the wind had taken some time off.  Unfortunately I was leaving to go to St Pierre but I waved to the nice weather on my way to the airport.  Once there I got into a very small, rather cute plane and flew to France.  Specifically I flew to St Pierre which is about forty five minutes flying time from St Johns.  To emphasise the non Englishness of our destination the safety briefing was given solely in French.  If the plane went down I was going to have to become bilingual in a hurry.

Getting through customs took all of a minute and soon I was in a car driven by Steve who I had hired to conduct me around the island.  He promptly attempted to sell me most of it but proved very useful nonetheless.  Dining options are limited in St Pierre on a Sunday and I wound up eating at a burger place, sort of like McDonalds but good.

So first the history; St Pierre and Miquelon have been bouncing back between France and Britain like a cold, windswept ping pong ball for most of its existence.  Which is to say since European settlement and people started writing things down.  For St Pierre mostly what they’ve been writing down is a score sheet to see who’s in charge.  The rest of St Pierre’s history is basically fishing, bootlegging, and more fishing with occasional pauses while either the French or the British raze the whole place to the ground depending on who currently has possession.

At present the French are in charge and the question is why do they bother?  St Pierre needs financial support from the French government to survive.  The fishing industry has crashed (ran out of fish) and the bootlegging industry can’t support everyone.  Yes, there is still bootlegging, not to the United States but rather to Canada.  As part of Europe (politically) the inhabitants of St Pierre are ideally placed to take advantage of the high tariffs Canada places on imported spirits.  Specifically they take advantage of them by loading anything alcoholic into a speedboat and sneaking it across to Newfoundland when the Coastguard isn’t watching.   Bootleg alcohol is about the only thing St Pierre exports (apart from sea cucumbers) and it imports virtually everything.  Steve took me down to the dock where a ship from Halifax turns up once a week and unloads an islands worth of virtually everything.

For the rest, the money from France is spent on roads, maintenance and generally keeping the island looking nice.  Incidentally the answer to the question “why do the French bother?” is simple.  Location, location, location.  St Pierre is sitting on top of what was once one of the great fishing grounds of the world and may be again if we stop killing them long enough to let them breed.  And underneath those fish deprived waters are unexploited reserves of oil and natural gas.  The are very good reasons for keeping the Tricolour flying over a portion of this region.  Conversely there are also good reasons for another sacking by the British.  It’s been a couple of centuries so they’re due.