72 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



veto in Kirke's patent was softened into a veto on settlers 

 building or farming ' upon or near ' the drying-grounds and 

 ships' rooms of the fishermen. The Commissioners had juris- 

 diction over all British subjects, and levied an excise on fish 

 caught by aliens ' as far as Trepassey V that is to say, on the 

 coast between Trepassey and Cape Bonavista. No tax on 

 aliens was ever levied outside these limits. The tax doubtless 

 drove away those aliens, who had not already withdrawn 

 from the coast which lay within these limits, and gave 

 a finishing touch to the exclusively English character which 

 events had already indelibly impressed upon this portion of 

 the coast. It was true that ' from Bonavise northward to 

 Trepasse southward is all that ever was and is now (1668) 

 possessed by the English '. 2 Those limits were not defined 

 by parchment but coincided with those of the six sub-colonies, 

 which Kirke's colony had absorbed, and represented the de 

 facto out-and-out English colony which had at last attained 

 historic reality. 



The Com- The idea of annual Commissioners, who were neither settlers 

 were new nor fishermen-visitors, but were or were assisted by the officers 

 temporary, of the annual convoys of State ships, was new and appropriate, 

 longed to or an ^ a characteristic example of the constructive statesman- 

 depended ship of the Interregnum. It was shadowed, however, by an 

 . '^ ea wmcn was also new and appropriate, and involved the 

 complete destruction of the colony. The contest between 

 these two ideas must be reserved for the next chapter. 



1 John Downing in Br. Mus. Egerton MSS. 2395, fol. 560, and in 

 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, Nov. 24, 1676. 



2 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1668? p. 560. 



