148 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



fair share of apprentices ; accordingly the bounties were only 

 bestowed on ships which carried fifteen (1775), twelve (1786), 

 or, if profits were paid in lieu of wages, seven men (1786). 

 Formerly Parliament threatened those who did not, now it 

 petted and coddled those who did carry out apprentices. 

 The old order was dying, and its life was being prolonged 

 by bribes and prizes. The Act of 1699 st M cumbered the 

 Statute-book; but it was already in rags and tatters, and no one 

 heeded what it mumbled. It proposed to make Newfound- 

 land a training-ground for sailors for the Royal Navy ; yet 

 during the Napoleonic wars officer after officer of the Royal 

 Navy complained that nowhere in the wide world were 

 sailors readier to desert or harder to replace. 1 Its last mask 

 was off; and the hollowness of its pretence to this particular 

 and sec ur- v i rtu e wa exposed. It attempted also to prevent sailors and 

 ity was craftsmen from leaking through Newfoundland to other 

 preventin" colonies, but now the merchants of Placentia, who complained 

 emigration that English sailors were leaking through Placentia into Nova 

 England. Scotia, were rebuked. Though discredited and repudiated, 

 a last effort was made to re-enforce or adapt one of its pro- 

 visions, in order to prevent fishermen from taking out 

 ' passengers ' to New England. Re-emigration to New Eng- 

 land had been forbidden for a century or more by every means 

 which charters, laws, or executive ingenuity could devise; until 

 Lord Vere Beauclerk at last wrote ' whether they (the New 

 Englanders) are esteemed aliens or strangers by the law 

 I could not really determine '. 2 Now that these doubts were 

 dispelled, the policy justified itself for the first time, and was 

 pursued with conviction as well as persistency. In the first 

 place each employer was to deduct from the wages of his 

 passenger-employees forty shillings a-piece (or less) for their 

 return fares and to arrange for their return. But what if the 

 passengers worked for profits and not for wages ? or sojourned, 



1 C. Pedley, History of Newfoundland, 1863, pp. 285-6. 



2 Dispatch, Sept. 26, 1730. 



