34 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



country to inhabit' into 'a country' which 'hath need of 

 a colony to cultivate it ' " was necessary : a sentiment which 

 looks like a nineteenth-century appeal to physical law. Who 

 should go? The simplest and crudest answer was that 

 paupers and criminals should go. Frobisher (157 7) and 

 Ralegh (1617) sailed, as Cabot sailed or asked to sail (1598), 

 with condemned men, and Gilbert (1583) with pirates. 

 Paupers figured in many schemes, 1 - 3 ' 1117 ' 8 Captain John Smith 

 suggesting 7 that parish orphans should be apprenticed, 

 Whitbourne 8 that each county should send out an annual 

 cargo of ' able subjects ', and appoint an agent in the colony 

 to transmit their wages to the parishes concerned, in order to 

 defray the costs which had been incurred ; and their sugges- 

 tions were only meant to enforce Sir John Popham's Act of 

 1697, which banished vagabonds 'into such part beyond the 

 seas as shall be at any time hereafter for that purpose assigned 

 by the Privy Council '. Gordon's saying, ' Better a plantation 

 than a debtor's prison,' 12 sounds like a prophecy of Georgia. 

 But what was written must be read with care. The writers 

 often meant, not that actual criminals and paupers, but that 

 the causes of possible future crime and pauperism should 

 be removed; thus Sir Ferdinando Gorges wrote that dis- 

 charged soldiers were likely to become pirates or mercenaries 

 unless they became emigrants. 17 Religion, too, was a crime ; 

 Peckham, Baltimore, Aiundel, and probably Northampton, 

 were Papists, John White was a Puritan, and when Hakluyt 

 described colonies as ' a place of safety if change of religion 

 or civil war should happen in this realm ', 2 he touched the 

 noblest of all incentives to colonization. Many, too, denounced 

 the wickedness of making colonies 'emunctories or sinks ' ) 13 - 15 - lti 

 and in Hayman's verses ' When you do see an idle lewd 

 young man You say he 's fit for our plantation, I say such 

 men as you are far more fit ' the sentiment almost atones 

 for the poetry. 16 John White wrote, ' A colony is a part and 

 l ~ 17 For references see pages 32-3. 



