A HALF-CENTURY OF PROGRESS, 1713-63 127 



fisheries at Fogo. The ball was set rolling, and the military 

 monopolist who communicated the original impulse was re- 

 called, because as a trader he was already more of a nuisance 

 than a necessity, and as a soldier he sinned against military 

 law. The prosperity of Placentia advanced by leaps and 

 bounds; in 1749 and 1751, chiefly owing to an influx of 

 Irishmen, the settlers and hangers-on of Placentia out- 

 numbered those of St. John's ; and shortly before the great 

 war (1742) Captain Taverner estimated the fishing-boats of 

 Placentia and Fortune Bays at one-fifth of all the fishing-boats 

 in Newfoundland (I739). 1 



The garrison still languished. In 1730 its acting com- and the 



mander was a Lieutenant ' confined to his bed by age and S arns n 



: languished. 



infirmities'; in 1736 its men were 'old men fit for Chelsea 

 only' and destitute of small arms; and in 1745 Colonel 

 Gledhill's son wrote that 'it was hard in such a dismal 

 climate as this where nothing grows to see the King's troops 

 naked'. After 1745 Placentia was no longer an utterly 

 isolated garrison and its woes ceased. 



In 1734 the convoy-captain urged the re-fortification of St. John's 

 St. John's, which had had no regular soldiers since the cata- *? as %~, 

 strophe of 1 709, and had been denuded of its last guns in 1721; 1741. 

 and its re-fortification was decreed in 1740. In 1741 the 

 Governor, Sir T. Smith, called the inhabitants of St. John's 

 together, persuaded them to make a fort, organized a militia 

 of Protestants, and left behind him ten guns in the charge of 

 the militia and of some 90 marines, who were relieved by 

 regulars in 1745. Thenceforth a Lieutenant-Governor of 

 Placentia Fort guarded Placentia with some 45 regulars, and 

 the Lieutenant-Governor of St. John's had under him detached 

 units at small forts erected on Boys Island (off Ferryland), on 

 Carbonear Island, and in Trinity Harbour, besides 320 

 militiamen with M. Gill as their Colonel. 



1 Total boats = 1,118 : Placentia, Burin, St. Pierre, and the Western 

 Fisheries = 230. 



