114 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



ThenJuS" 

 tices of the 

 Peace were 

 appointed 

 and made 

 deputy 

 Governors 

 during 

 winter, 

 1729. , 



Courts of 

 Law were 

 instituted, 

 1729 to 

 1763. 



artificial State were the chaplain (named Jago) and two lead- 

 ing residents (named Southmead and Rook) ; and they held 

 ' Courts ', destroyed dangerous chimneys, whipped a servant 

 who spat upon his mistress, and enforced contracts and rights 

 of way. But this experiment was not repeated; otherwise 

 St. John's might have been transformed by the ideas of an 

 English philosopher into the semblance of some city of ancient 

 Greece, in which all powers sprang from and resided in a few 

 original fathers and householders, with three short-lived 

 archontes as their deputies, and with some two hundred 

 unrepresented bachelors as their helots or metics. In 1728 

 W. Keen, who had been ordered by the convoy-captain to 

 report disorders, arrested and sent a murderer to England at 

 his own expense.^ In 1729 the first resident Justices of the 

 Peace were appointed under the sanction of law by the first 

 Governor, a prison-rate was levied, and prisoners' stocks 

 were built at St. John's and Ferryland. Keen, Weston, and 

 Southmead were the first Justices for St. John's and its 

 neighbourhood, and they controlled seven constables. Similar 

 arrangements were made in five other districts. If Rip van 

 Winkle had gone to sleep in 1629 and awakened in the winter 

 of 1729, he would have fancied that the six colonial Gover- 

 nors whom he knew had been transformed in one night into 

 Justices of the Peace, who reigned over six districts which 

 were a little larger than those of yesterday, in order to com- 

 pensate for their diminished glory. 



Between 1729 and 1763 a Court and Judge of Vice- 

 Admiralty (i 737V a naval officer (1741),^ a Criminal Court 

 of Oyer and Terminer — with five local Commissioners instead 

 of a judge (1750 et seq.), — and a Custom House (1762) 

 came into existence. Special Courts with Vice-Admiralty 



* He also did so in 1720 and 1730. 



' Captain Lee's dispatch, Sept. 21, 1737. 



^ Captain Thomas Smith's dispatch, Dec. 19, 174 1. W. Keen, junior, 

 son of the W. Keen, was N. O. 1742; Captain J. Byng's dispatch, 

 Feb. 23, 1743. 



