76 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



after which 

 theWestern 

 Charter 

 was re- 

 enacted 

 with a 

 clause 

 against 

 boatmen 

 passengers 



made; nor was any action taken before the end of the 

 Commonwealth. After the Restoration no Governor was 

 appointed for the island by the Kirkes, but Cecil Lord 

 Baltimore, having vindicated his title to the province of 

 Avalon, appointed Captains J. Rayner and Pearse joint 

 Governors, and afterwards (1663) Captain R. Swanley sole 

 Governor thereof. Efforts were made to induce the King to 

 appoint William Hinton, or Captain R. Robinson, R.N., or 

 William son of John Downing, Governor, not only of the 

 whole island but of the fishermen as well, and petitions to 

 this effect evoked counter-petitions for the abolition of all 

 Governors, whether limited or unlimited, special or general. 

 But the Government ignored both the petitioners and the 

 counter-petitioners, and evaded or postponed decisive action 

 by renewing in i66i the so-called Western Charter of 1634, 

 with a superadded eleventh commandment, prohibiting fisher- 

 men from carrying any one to Newfoundland other than the 

 ships' crew or settlers. An alarm had been raised that ' the 

 fishery ' was carried on ' without fishing-ships ' or ocean 

 sailors, but only by boatmen, who went out as passengers and 

 fished in the bays either in boats of their own, or as day 

 labourers in the boats of other small boat owners, and some- 

 times (worst of all) fled to New England and settled there. 

 What, it was asked, had become of the arguments of 

 Hitchcock and the other prophets of the fishing school.? 

 Either these boatmen were not ocean sailors or they were. 

 If they were not, distant fisheries were not educating ocean 

 sailors ; if they were, distant fisheries were the means of 

 draining away ocean sailors to New England, and New 

 England could not help if old England were invaded as in 

 1588. Indeed, most of the alarmists went further, and wrote 

 of New England as though it were a foreign country. The 

 cry that our best citizens were being ' spirited away ' had 

 been raised in 161 1 * and was now raised with regard to 



1 Ante, p. 56. 



