ARGUMENT OF SIR WILLIAM ROBSON. 1791 



thought perhaps he would meet the cutter as he went out. So he 

 did not trouble about the custom-house. Then he did not meet the 

 cutter. Then there is another custom-house still further on at Lark 

 Harbour, and he thought perhaps he would be able to make Lark 

 Harbour. Then the weather got bad, and he began to think it was 

 late in the season, and he remembered that his employers, Messrs. 

 Pew and Son, of Gloucester, Massachusetts he remembered that they 

 had told him that he must on no account get caught by the ice, he 

 must come away. Well, if he had been anxious to fulfil the obligation 

 to his employers, and his obligation to the State, he perhaps would 

 have gone there a little earlier, and would not have stayed quite so 

 long. But, he thought, I must get away, whatever the laws of New- 

 foundland say, Messrs. Pew and Son are a rather more close and im- 

 portant authority, they say I must go, and so he went. Then, says 

 Mr. Elder, as if. it were some enormity : he came back again, and he 

 was arrested. I should think he would be arrested. And, he was 

 told he had no business to go without clearing, and he was fined 40Z. 

 two hundred dollars. 



Now, says Mr. Elder, is not there a case of hardship ? I say, and 

 very emphatically, as one having some humble concern with the ad- 

 ministration of the law, it was no hardship at all. It served him. 

 right. He would well have deserved and merited a higher fine than 

 the 200 dollars put upon him. Just consider ! Here he comes into a 

 port late. The Tribunal can judge as well as I can about the idea of 

 his being locked in the ice at that date I forget what the date was 

 in November 



SIR CHARLES FITZPATRICK : He was not in the exercise of the treaty 



right at all, was he? 



1083 SIR W. ROBSOX : Oh no, not fishing at all. He was buying 

 salted herring; but Mr. Elder put it, I almost thought, with a 

 little catch or sob in his voice, that this was a hardy fisherman, the 

 laborious and poverty-stricken fisherman. Not at all. It was the 

 trader I will not say millionaire, but a highly important and pros- 

 perous gentleman in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who paid the fine. 

 He did not pay a penny too much not a penny too much. He sends 

 his man there, and he says in effect, according to Captain Cosgrove's 

 story: Don't you trouble about Newfoundland or Great Britain, 

 those powers are remote, I am the person you have got to think 

 about; last season one of my ships was caught in the ice, don't let 

 that happen again or you will leave blank what will be the alterna- 

 tive, what will happen if that occurs again you must come out. The 

 story told by Mr. Elder, as told by Captain Cosgrove in his own affi- 

 davit, as to the orders he got from his employers, was nothing less 

 tli :i n tantamount to a requirement on the part of his employer that 

 he should break the law if necessary. And, just imagine a man 



