Saint Pierre and Miquelon's history: an archipelago emptied and refilled

Who used the islands before France settled them

People came to the islands long before any European ship. French Wikipedia dates the oldest traces to the Maritime Archaic period, between about 3000 and 1200 BC, followed by Palaeo-Eskimo visitors and, between 1100 and 1500, a camp of the ancestors of the Beothuk at Anse à Henry on Saint-Pierre. The groups came to hunt and to quarry rhyolite for tools. No year-round Indigenous settlement has been found, and by the time Europeans arrived nobody lived there permanently. The Mi'kmaq still have their own names for the places: Senpir for Saint-Pierre and Mikliin for Miquelon.

The Portuguese navigator João Álvares Fagundes landed on 21 October 1520, the feast of Saint Ursula, and called the group the Eleven Thousand Virgins. Jacques Cartier stopped there in June 1536 and wrote of the "yles sainct Pierre", where he found "several ships, both from France and from Brittany". By then Basque, Breton and Norman crews had been fishing these waters for some thirty years. The name Miquelon first appears in a pilot book for sailors that the Basque captain Martin de Hoyarçabal published in 1579, and is usually read as a Basque form of Michel.

For most of the sixteenth century the islands were a seasonal base. Fishermen from Saint-Malo, La Rochelle, Granville and the Basque ports came ashore to salt and dry cod, and left before winter. The first fixed settlements, the town of Saint-Pierre among them, date from about 1604 according to the language atlas of Université Laval and the Aquitaine association AQAF. In 1670 Jean Talon, intendant of New France, recorded thirteen fishermen and four settled residents, and by 1687 three families lived there year round.

Why the islands changed hands nine times

The settlement grew up in the middle of the Anglo-French wars. The islands belonged to the French colony centred on Plaisance in Newfoundland, and English Wikipedia counts at least five English attacks on them during King William's War and Queen Anne's War, between 1689 and 1712. Many of the French settlers had left by 1708. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 gave Newfoundland and the islands to Britain, which renamed Saint-Pierre Saint Peter's. A Massachusetts captain, Diamond Sarjeant, bought Miquelon in 1722.

The Treaty of Paris of 1763 stripped France of almost all of New France and handed the two small islands back, as a shelter for French fishermen working the coast of Newfoundland. What followed is the stretch Laval tabulates as nine changes of ruler between 1690 and 1814.

How the Acadians were expelled a second time

The first Acadians reached Miquelon in the summer of 1763: 115 people from the Hébert, Vigneau, LeBlanc and Sire families, according to AQAF, survivors of the British deportation from Nova Scotia that had begun in 1755. More followed, and AQAF puts them at more than two thirds of a permanent population of about 1,250 by 1767. They tried to farm the thin soil of Miquelon and mostly failed. That year the French government decided the islands were too small and too poor to feed them and shipped them to Brest, Saint-Malo, Lorient and Dunkirk. In 1768 it changed its mind and let them return.

They did not stay long. When France entered the American War of Independence, a British force under John Montagu took the islands in 1778, burnt every building and sent about 1,300 inhabitants to France, Laval records. After the Treaty of Versailles of 1783 some 600 Acadians came back. In 1793, after news of the execution of Louis XVI reached the islands, the royalist Acadians of Miquelon left on their own for the Magdalen Islands, and that May a British force under William Affleck occupied Saint-Pierre. The 950 remaining residents were shipped to Halifax in 1794 and held there for two years. Laval counts four removals in all for the Acadians of the archipelago.

Why the islands stood empty for twenty years

In 1796 a French squadron under Joseph de Richery attacked, sank 80 British vessels and burnt the abandoned town. Nobody lived on the islands afterwards. The Treaty of Amiens returned them to France in 1802 and war took them back to Britain the next year. The second Treaty of Paris, of 20 November 1815, gave them to France for the last time. When some 700 colonists landed in June 1816 they found, in the phrase Laval quotes, "a land as bare as on the day it was discovered". The present population, as both Laval and AQAF put it, dates from that resettlement, with the Acadian families as its oldest strand.

How cod built the colony after the resettlement

For the rest of the century Saint-Pierre lived off the French fleet on the Grand Banks. In the nineteenth century about 200 French vessels fished the surrounding waters, and as many as 8,000 fishermen a year came out from Saint-Malo, Fécamp, Saint-Brieuc and Dieppe. Islanders worked as outfitters, supplying the boats and salting and drying the catch, which went as saltfish to the Caribbean and much of Europe and as wet-cured fish to France. Fires destroyed part or nearly all of the town in 1844, 1865 and 1867.

The colony acquired the institutions of a town. A post office opened in 1854, the administration began its Feuille Officielle in 1866, and the Banque des Îles opened in 1889. From 1869 the first French transatlantic telegraph cable ran from Brest through Saint-Pierre to Duxbury in Massachusetts, and six of the twelve French cables laid between 1869 and 1897 passed through Saint-Pierre or Miquelon. Île aux Chiens, the small island facing the harbour, became a municipality of its own in 1892 with about 700 inhabitants. On 24 August 1889 the colony carried out the only execution by guillotine in North America, with a machine shipped from Martinique.

What ended the cod prosperity

The decline came from several directions at once. Newfoundland passed its Bait Act in 1887 and cut the supply of bait to French boats. The market for saltfish peaked in 1886. Steamships could carry their catch home without calling at the islands. In 1904, under the Entente cordiale, France gave up its rights on the French Shore of Newfoundland for compensation in Africa. In 1903 some islanders favoured joining the United States, and an annexationist stood for the Chamber of Deputies; the incumbent who opposed annexation kept his seat by a small margin in December 1903. By 1914 the economy had shrunk to a third of its former size. About 400 men from the colony served in the French forces during the First World War, and 100 of them died.

How Prohibition turned Saint-Pierre into a warehouse

American Prohibition began in January 1920, and Saint-Pierre, as French territory outside the reach of the Volstead Act, became a transit port for liquor bound for the United States. A French law that had barred imports of foreign spirits was repealed in 1922, and the trade grew quickly. Canadian whisky, Caribbean rum and French wine and brandy were landed, stored and shipped south. French Wikipedia puts the traffic at up to 300,000 cases a year. The New York Times reported in 1931 that the islands had imported 1,815,271 US gallons of Canadian whisky in twelve months.

Wayne Curtis, writing in American Heritage in 2007 from the papers of the dealer Henri Morazé, describes two phases. At first converted fishing schooners carried up to 3,000 cases each. After Canada required exporters to post a bond refundable only on proof of a legal landing, smugglers cleared their cargo for Saint-Pierre and moved to purpose-built boats carrying up to 25,000 cases. Some two dozen new warehouses went up, by one estimate able to hold a million cases, and concrete wharves were built with chutes for loading. One reporter counted 15 to 20 rum-runners tied up at any time. In 2007 two concrete warehouses on the harbour still carried the dates 1928 and 1929.

Fishermen gave up fishing to unload crates, and Jean Pierre Andrieux, whose family kept the papers, told Curtis that the colony then ran a budget surplus for the first time. Locally the period is remembered as les temps de la fraude. Bottles were repacked in sacks to stop them rattling, and the discarded crates were burnt for heat or nailed into walls; one small house, the Cutty Sark villa, was built entirely from whisky cases. A straw hat said to have belonged to Al Capone is kept at the Hôtel Robert. Repeal in 1933 ended the trade and left the islands in depression.

Why Free French sailors landed on Christmas Eve

After the armistice of 22 June 1940 the administrator Gilbert de Bournat took the colony into the Vichy regime. Canada and the United States still recognised Vichy, and the powerful radio transmitter on Saint-Pierre worried Ottawa, which suspected it of helping German submarines on the Banks. Canada drew up a landing force but its prime minister did not let it act. On 17 December 1941 the United States confirmed a standstill agreement with the Vichy authorities in the French Caribbean. De Gaulle, fearing a Canadian or American move, ordered Vice Admiral Émile Muselier to take the islands.

The flotilla sailed from Halifax on 23 December, officially for training: the submarine Surcouf and the corvettes Mimosa, Aconit and Alysse. It reached Saint-Pierre at three in the morning of 24 December. The accounts differ on the numbers. English and French Wikipedia give 230 men and twenty minutes; Terry Reardon, writing for the International Churchill Society in 2007, gives 360 sailors and thirty minutes. All agree that no shot was fired. A consultation the next day, open to men aged 18 and over, returned 98.2% of the votes cast for Free France, 77.4% of those registered.

Washington was furious. The Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, called it the action of "so-called Free French" ships, contrary to the agreement of all parties, and the American press mocked the phrase. The dispute was closed on 22 January 1942 with an arrangement that left the islands as Muselier had organised them. After the rally 383 men, 56 women and 36 boys from the islands joined the Free French forces. When a U-boat sank the corvette Mimosa on 9 June 1942, 17 of the 65 lost were from the archipelago.

How the archipelago's status kept changing

The colony became an overseas territory in 1946, and in 1958 it chose to keep that status. Dependence on Paris grew: by the 1960s French subsidies made up half the islands' budget. On 3 January 1960 eleven of the fourteen general councillors and the senator Henri Claireaux resigned over the economic effect of the new franc. In 1965 Paris sent in mobile gendarmes during a political crisis, and the islands answered with a three-day general strike. De Gaulle visited on 20 July 1967, four days before his speech in Montreal.

The status then changed three more times. The islands became an overseas department on 19 July 1976, a territorial collectivity under the law of 11 June 1985, which took them out of the European Communities, and an overseas collectivity after the constitutional revision of 28 March 2003, with its present statute fixed by an organic law of 21 February 2007. The politics article follows what each step changed.

The industrial fishery still carried its losses. The trawler Ravenel, built at Saint-Malo in 1961 for the Société de pêche et de congélation, vanished without a distress call in January 1962 with fifteen aboard, leaving about ten widows and 27 orphans. French Wikipedia dates the loss to 29 January and the regional broadcaster La 1ère to 28 January. Searches in 2021 and 2022 found nothing. In May 2025 a CNRS seabed survey, guided by the former fishing captain Karl Beaupertuis, located a wreck, and on 10 June 2025 the collectivity and the prefect announced that it was the Ravenel, lying at 124 metres about 13 km south-east of the port.

How the cod dispute ended in a corridor

Canada and France began issuing permits for oil and gas exploration around the St. Pierre Bank in 1966, agreed a moratorium on it in 1967 and fixed the boundary of their territorial seas in 1972. In 1977 Canada claimed a 200-mile fishing zone and France a 200-mile economic zone around the islands, and the two overlapped. Through the 1980s Canada cut French quotas as stocks fell, and the islanders replied with what became known as the cod crusade. In April 1988 Canadian coastguards boarded the trawler Croix-de-Lorraine, fishing in Canadian waters with four of the islands' elected officials and their bishop aboard, and held them for two days in St. John's.

The two governments agreed in March 1989 to send the boundary to an arbitral tribunal of five, which ruled 3 to 2 on 10 June 1992, both national members dissenting. France received a zone extending 24 nautical miles to the west of the islands and a corridor about 10.5 nautical miles wide running 188 nautical miles south. Wikipedia gives the area as 12,348 km² and 25% of the French claim; French Wikipedia gives 12,400 km² of the 47,000 km² France asked for. Commentators have likened its shape to a keyhole, a mushroom and a baguette.

In July 1992 Canada declared its moratorium on cod. On 7 January 1993 two boats, the Marmouset and the Goélette, left Saint-Pierre to fish in Canadian waters in protest, watched by most of the population. Both were towed to St. John's, and a Newfoundland court later fined the islands' senator Albert Pen and deputy Gérard Grignon CA$15,000 each. An agreement in November 1994 settled the fisheries question. In 1996 Canada extended its own economic zone from Sable Island, and the French corridor has been enclosed by Canadian waters since. La 1ère's verdict, from 2023, is that the single industry of cod ended in 1992.