Il6 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



and little 



mono- 



shore fi.$h~ 



eries 



driving 



vessels 



compete with one another, and Admiral J. Byng complained 

 that three or four merchants in St. John's boarded vessels 

 which arrived, bought up everything, and engrossed all the 

 trade (1742). Next came a landlord and shop-keeping class, 

 which lived without fishing and by giving credit and lending 

 to fishermen. 



' The inhabitants of St. John's ', wrote Captain Percy, ' have 

 ^ ^ keeping of boats and servants for fishing. They live 

 by letting out their stages and keeping public-houses. Here 



are a nest ^ ^ tt; ^ e P ec ^ ars wno g es ( Sl ' c ) under the denomina- 

 tion of merchant factors, have small store houses, inhabit 

 among the planters all the winter, and involve them over 

 head and ears in debt' (1720). The prevalence of traders 

 at the capital was due to economic causes. It paid better 

 for producers to stick to production and the traders to stick 

 to trade. ' The nest of little pedlars ' was due to the superiority 

 of innumerable small boats worked by their owners, over the 

 boats of absentees. According to Captain Percy, five men 

 in a boat, with hired stages, caught one hundred quintals 

 more fish than the hired boatmen of a rich inhabitant who 

 owned houses and stages and lived and peddled on shore. 

 The small, self-interested capitalists not only drove the traders 

 kut t ^ ie shipowners away from the inshore fisheries. 



The fishing admirals and captains ' have left off keeping 

 ^ shallops and fishing near the shore . . . but send their 

 ships and vessels on the Banks for a month or five weeks ', 

 neglecting, as Captain Lee added, their judicial duties (1736). 

 Captain Lee might have also added that they lost their former 

 fishing-posts upon the shore ; because, although the Act of 

 1699 allowed them to occupy posts wherever they had occu- 

 pied posts since 1685, no record was kept of where those 

 posts were, except in the fleshy tablets of the fishermen's 

 minds, and fishermen's memories could only be kept fresh by 

 continuous use ; whilst settlers, forgetting what it was not their 

 interest to recollect, began to encroach upon the seaside. In 



