YEAR JUST CLOSED CALLED ONE OF NEWFOUNDLAND’S BEST

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6863, 19 March 1929, Page 8

YEAR JUST CLOSED CALLED ONE OF NEWFOUNDLAND’S BEST

OTTAWA, Feb. 6. Newfoundland has just closed one of the most successful years in her industrial and economic history. The fisheries, by which the great mass of the people obtain a livelihood, were more profitable in 10528 than in 1927. The value of cod fishing is £2,600,000, as against £520,000 for all the other fisheries —lobster, herring, salmon, seal, whale. Export of medicine oil was £120,000, ail'd of industrial cod oil £IIO.OOO. Lobster fishing was permitted after a close season of three years, prescribed to give these slow-breeding creatures an opportunity to. reproduce, after a generation of intensive fishing. Brine freezing, the new method of preserving salmon, promises to supersede all other methods. The industry was worth £95,000. The seal fishery, one of the world’s most remarkable" industries, in which the hunters seek their prey among the iccflows of the North Atlantic, was aided by aeroplanes used successfully for “spotting" the herds. Baby machines at first carried on the sealers and launched from the deck, now tako off from a land base on both west and cast coasts. The old-time sailer has been entirely replaced by steam—and oil-'driven craft. Sealing was worth £150,000. Five companies operate the whale fleet. One whaling steamer, whose propeller and rudder were smashed by a blow from the tail of a harpooned whale, was blown ashore by a gale and wrecked. The whaling industry was worth £IIO,OOO. Of tho two paper mills, one, operated by Lord Rothermero at Grand Falls, has an output at £1,250.000, with a subsidiary plant with a third of that

capacity. The second, recently purchased by Americans from English interests, has an output valued at £1,600 000 annually. Iron, the chief mino industry, produced 1,548,000 tons, which is mainly exported to Germany, where it is used by some of the largest steel makers, and to the British Empire Steel Corporation at Sydney, Nova Scotia.