You can take a ferry from Newfoundland to France

What surprises people is how little effort the place puts into being French. It has no need to.

There are bakeries, and they are French bakeries. The cheese and the wine come from France. Most of the shops shut at noon for lunch and open again when lunch is over, which is not a decision anyone here feels the need to explain.

The town itself looks like neither country. The houses are wooden, as they are in Newfoundland, and painted every colour a hardware store stocks. They are packed onto a hillside above the harbour as if land were scarce, which it is. About 5,800 people live in the whole territory, and nearly all of them live in this one town.

Down by the water is a pelota court built in 1906. A good many of the families here came from the Basque country, and the rest from Brittany and Normandy. Every August there is a Basque festival, with dancing, and large men pulling on a rope.

For a small fishing port, Saint-Pierre has had an eventful time.

When the United States banned alcohol in 1920, it could not stop Canada making it, and Canada was free to sell it to France. France, conveniently, was 20 kilometres away. Distillers shipped whisky here by the boatload and smugglers ran it down the coast. In a single year the islands took in about seven million litres. The fish plants became warehouses. Wooden crates rattled and gave the boats away, so the bottles were repacked in sacks, and at least one house in town was built out of the crates left behind. The Hôtel Robert still shows a hat it says Al Capone forgot. Prohibition ended in 1933, and with it the best thirteen years the local economy ever had.

In 1889 a fisherman named Auguste Néel was sentenced to death for murder. French law called for the guillotine and the colony did not own one, so one was shipped up from Martinique. Nobody on the island would work it. In the end a prisoner agreed to. It is the only time the guillotine has been used in North America, and the machine is in the town museum.

On Christmas Eve 1941 the islands were still answering to Vichy. A Free French admiral arrived with three small warships and a submarine and took the place without firing a shot. The next day he held a vote, and 98 percent chose de Gaulle. Washington, which had an understanding with Vichy, was furious. It made no difference.

All of that was a sideshow. For four hundred years the real business here was cod.

Then the cod ran out. In 1992 Canada closed its cod fishery, and in the same year a tribunal settled a long argument between Canada and France over who owned the sea around the islands. France had asked for a great deal. It was given a band of water around the islands and a corridor 19 kilometres wide running about 350 kilometres due south, roughly a quarter of what it wanted. On the chart it looks exactly like a baguette, and that is what everybody calls it.

The fishing never came back. The islands now live largely on money from Paris and on whatever visitors bring.

Across the harbour is Île aux Marins, the island of sailors, where fishing families lived until the 1960s. Their houses, the church of 1874, the school and a shipwreck are all still there, kept up as a museum. In summer a small boat goes over every half hour and takes about ten minutes.

In town, a few dories are still hauled up the slip by capstan, in front of a row of fishing sheds painted the same colours as the houses. People still go out in them. Not for a living.