76 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



made ; nor was any action taken before the end of the 

 after which Commonwealth. After the Restoration no Governor was 



a pp inted for the island b y lhe Kirkes > but Cecil L rd 



Baltimore, having vindicated his title to the province of 

 Avalon, appointed Captains J. Rayner and Pearse joint 

 clause Governors, and afterwards (1663) Captain R. Swanley sole 



against Governor thereof. Efforts were made to induce the Kins: to 

 boatmen 



passengers : appoint William Hinton, or Captain R. Robinson, R.N., or 



William son of John Downing, Governor, not only of the 

 whole island but of the fishermen as well, and petitions to 

 this effect evoked counter-petitions for the abolition of all 

 Governors, whether limited or unlimited, special or general. 

 But the Government ignored both the petitioners and the 

 counter-petitioners, and evaded or postponed decisive action 

 by renewing in 1661 the so-called Western Charter of 1634, 

 with a superaddcd eleventh commandment, prohibiting fisher- 

 men from carrying any one to Newfoundland other than the 

 ships' crew or settlers. An alarm had been raised that ' the 

 fishery ' was carried on ' without fishing-ships ' or ocean 

 sailors, but only by boatmen, who went out as passengers and 

 fished in the bays either in boats of their own, or as day 

 labourers in the boats of other small boat owners, and some- 

 times (worst of all) fled to New England and settled there. 

 What, it was asked, had become of the arguments of 

 Hitchcock and the other prophets of the fishing school ? 

 Either these boatmen were not ocean sailors or they were. 

 If they were not, distant fisheries were not educating ocean 

 sailors ; if they were, distant fisheries were the means of 

 draining away ocean sailors to New England, and New 

 England could not help if old England were invaded as in 

 1588. Indeed, most of the alarmists went further, and wrote 

 of New England as though it were a foreign country. The 

 cry that our best citizens were being ' spirited away ' had 

 been raised in 1611 * and was now raised with regard to 



1 Ante, p. 56. 



