Gaspe Coast

The Gaspé Peninsula reaches into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, its northern shore facing Anticosti across a broad stretch of water. Mi'kmaq communities lived along its coasts and rivers, and European fishing ships came for the cod found offshore. By 1542 the navigator Jean Alfonse described a substantial fishery on the Gaspé coast and near Anticosti. In the eighteenth century merchants from Jersey developed the trade in dried cod, sending fish from the peninsula to markets in southern Europe.