Les Graviers - Clochards des mers

"Do you want to know how low the exploitation of the poor human beast can go? Try to come here one day when the gravels from Saint-Pierre arrive!" wrote the Breton author Charles le Goffic.

The gravels were children employed in Saint-Pierre and Miquelon or Newfoundland to turn over the cod that had to dry on the shore. Children of little importance! Thus, a shipowner from the beginning of the last century exclaimed without any kindness: "gravels are like mushrooms after the rain, you only have to bend down to pick them..." Who were these children? They were between 10 and 16 years old, there were even some as young as 8. Originally from the north of Brittany, Normandy and sometimes the Basque Country, they crossed the sea, the journey lasted almost a month, on a cramped boat that could hold a good hundred gravels. Their destination was off the coast of Newfoundland or Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, on an island called "des Chiens" where they would go for several months to turn the cod on the "graves" so that they would dry in the wind and sun.

This little-known story of child exploitation from the end of the 1840s to the 1940s has been deliberately forgotten. The reason is simple: many children were hired for a bonus by their fathers to the gravels so that they would know the world of the sea in order to be able to join the navy.