Musée des Terre-Neuvas et de la Pêche
Fécamp was once the cod-fishing capital of France, sending hundreds of schooners to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland every spring for over four centuries. This small but absorbing museum in a 19th-century mansion tells that extraordinary story through ship models, navigational instruments, paintings and the personal diaries of fishermen who spent six months at sea.
The Terre-Neuvas Story
The 'terre-neuvas' — the men who fished Newfoundland — worked in tiny dories launched from the mother ship, alone on the Atlantic in fog and swell, pulling cod by hand-line. The museum's recreated dory with its original equipment makes the danger viscerally real.
A large-scale model of a three-masted schooner shows exactly how 60 men lived and worked in a hull designed primarily to carry salt and salted fish; the cramped fo'c'sle bunks are a sobering sight.
What Else to See
The collection of navigational charts, sextants and compasses spans three centuries; several charts show Newfoundland coastlines mapped by Fécamp captains before any official survey existed.
The museum also covers the herring and mackerel fisheries closer to home, with beautiful 19th-century watercolours of the harbour as it looked when 300 boats worked out of Fécamp annually.
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