BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH COLONIZATION 67 



Lord Baltimore expelled the French), Cape Race, and Cape 

 Bonavista. They were crowded out. The method of 

 occupying a little port here and a little port there, and of 

 leaving the natural capital to take care of itself, came 

 instinctively to seafarers from the numberless little ports of 

 Devonshire and Cornwall, and was perhaps also due to the 

 rarity of ready-made clearances on the shores of this ' land of 

 hills and woods'.^ Nomadic fishermen had cut down or 

 burned trees near the shore; the pioneers apparently ex- 

 pected to find, and found around their first homes some three 

 or four acres of cleared land for their gardens and crops ; but 

 all of them noted as something exceptional a few hundred 

 acres of natural pasture land at Trinity Harbour, Verde Bay, 

 Renewse, Cape Race, and Trepassey. ^ As a rule rocks, firs, 

 pines, and birch trees seem to have come close to the shores, 

 on which fishermen dried their fish, and to have made it 

 difiicult to pass from cove to cove. Whatever its cause may 

 have been, this tendency to dispersion succeeded so far as the 

 fretted eastern fringe of Guy's inner colony was concerned. 

 It is true that there was a plethora of poetry, and that Mason, 

 Falkland, Whitbourne, Vaughan, and Hayman wrote books 

 which are of more importance to historians than to history, 

 and that the silent colonizers, Baltimore, Guy, and Wynne 

 did most; it is true, too, that the idea of planting Scotch, 

 Irish, Welsh, and West-country folk in several centres was 

 never translated into practice ; but, after all, these six small 

 colonies without a capital made Trepassey, Conception, and 

 Trinity Bays, and all that lay between them, very English. 



We had almost forgotten the seventh sister-colony which (7) And 

 Sir W. Alexander bought from the patentees of 16 10, and'^J'J^' 

 which extended beyond the confines of Guy's inner colony ander's 

 from Placentia Bay to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.^ Sir W. '/X^j/ 



1 Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, vol. viii, p. 82. out west, 



2 Purchas, Pilgrvns, vol. xix, pp. 414, 431, 447, &c. 



3 Publications of Prince Society, Boston : Sir W. Alexander, by 

 E. F. Slafter, 1873, p. 188 



F 2 



