10. Léon and Marie Arsenault

Léon Arsenault (1880-1968) in a fishing boat at the Abram's Village wharf. This picture seems to have “Tbeen taken by the Department of Tourism around 1950.

Like today, lobster-fishing was the most lucrative of the local fisheries. For many years, Léon owned two boats and two sets of gear and he depended mainly on his sons for cheap labour. He, in fact, introduced his five sons to fishing when they were very young and some of them become independent fishermen before getting married. During the Great Depression in the 1930's, the four oldest boys fished out of Maximeville and some of them even went out as far as Miminegash to fish for cod. Pete, who started fishing in 1941, often reminisces about those years when the family farm was also a rather impressive fishing enterprise:

There were three of my brothers who were living at home. They all had helpers and, in the morning, there were eight of them having breakfast together. We didn't have electricity in those days, so they had their breakfast by lamplight and in the evening, by September, they would also have their supper by lamplight. They were not equipped at that time to fish as we are today, and so it took them longer to haul the traps. They could each set 400 to 500 traps.

Aunt Aline Poirier recalls how she and her sisters took turns and stayed home to help their

mother feed all those men. "We got up at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning to cook breakfast, we cooked beans and eggs.”

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