50 



and depopulate the colony. Sir John Berry was accordingly sent over, 

 with orders to drive out the fishermen, and burn their dwellings. The 

 extent of his devastations under this more than barbarous decree may 

 not be certainly known ; but six years elapsed before the mandate of 

 destruction was revoked, and its abrogation was accompanied with in- 

 structions to allow of no further emigrations fi'om England to the 

 doomed island. Complaints were made that emigration continued, 

 and various plans were suggested to discourage and prevent it. Mean- 

 time, the relations between the resident fishermen and the masters and 

 crews of the ships sent out by the English merchants were hostile to 

 an extent which, at the present day, seems almost incredible. Pre- 

 vious to the edict just noticed, the former had petitioned the King for the 

 establishment of some form of government, to protect them against 

 the rapacity of their own countrymen — the latter. The merchants op- 

 posed the measure, as injurious to the fisheries, and prevailed. The 

 petition of the residents was renewed from time to time, but never 

 with success ; and they continued to suffer wrongs and cruelties with- 

 out redress. 



The merchants convinced the ministry, or the Lords of Trade and 

 Plantations, that the appointment of a governor, and the recognition of 

 the full rights of the inhabitants of Newfoundland as British subjects, 

 would produce the ruinous results anticipated by Child, and, strange 

 as it may appear, no Englishman could lawliilly have a home on that 

 island for a long period. 



The edict of 1670, to burn and destroy, had the effect, possibly, to 

 increase the number of ships, since, four years afterward, two hundred 

 and seventy, employing, on board and on shore, ten thousand eight 

 hundred men, were engaged in the fishery. Yet the seas were not safe. 

 Some of the fishing vessels mounted from ten to twenty guns, and 

 carried liom sixty to one hundred men, and others sailed under convoy, 

 and were protected, while on the coast, by ships-of-war. The price 

 of fish, to support this state of things, must have been enormous. 



As the century closes we notice the mention of a report of the Lords 

 of Trade and Plantations, in which they so tar modify their former 

 order, relative to emigration, as to intimate that, inasmuch as a 

 thousand persons might be useful at Newfoundland, to construct boats 

 and fishing-stages, that number would be suffered to five there, without 

 fear, we may conclude, of official incendiaries and legal robbers. But 

 the gracious privilege thus accorded still placed the resident fishermen 

 at the tender mercies of the merchants and the masters of their vessels ; 

 for, by an act of Parliament in 1698, these masters, in the absence 

 of all law, were authorized to administer justice, and to regulate the 

 general concerns of the fisheries and of the colony, almost at 

 pleasure. 



nflucnce — ;a sort of gently-ripening hot-house — where eight members of Parliament receive 

 salaries of a thousand a year, for a certain given time, in order to mature, at a proper season, 

 a claim to t-wo thousand, granted for doing less, and on the credit of having toiled so long in 

 that inferior laborious department. I have known that board, off and on, for a great ninuber 

 of years. Both of its pretended objects have been much the objects of my study, if I have a 

 right to call any pursuits of mine by so respectable a n;ime. I can assure the House — and I 

 hope that they will not think that I risk my little credit lightly — that, without meaning to 

 convey the least reflection upon any one of its members, past or present, it is a board which 

 if not miscMevaus, is of uo use at all." 



