126 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



arriving Colonel Moody was faced with a general mutiny, 

 because his men had no beer. So the Colonel believing, as 

 he said, that 'their drinking only water thawed from ice 

 would infallibly have killed most of the garrison', bought 

 molasses wholesale from the ubiquitous New England ships, 

 and successfully quenched the mutiny with calibogus. 

 During the next four years no clothes arrived, and the 

 soldiers 'are now in a manner naked' (17 17), but this want 

 was less serious and only evoked mild murmurs. Year after 

 year down to 1726 the deputy governor had to keep the 

 garrison, the settlers, their wives and their children from 

 perishing, as best he could, and in 1725 there were not two 

 settlers in Placentia who had not been fed by his bounty. 

 One of two things was inevitable — starvation or wholesale 

 trading ; and the deputy governor was the only man who had 

 credit. As in New South Wales seventy years later, the 

 deputy governor adopted the second alternative. He became 

 the only merchant, * the only banker ' — whose reserve was 

 a floating security called rum — and ' the only shop ', besides 

 keeping * cattle, poultry, and a dairy '. The'reports from which 

 these quotations are taken were dated 1726 and 1727, for it was 

 not till then that the home authorities knew what was being 

 done. In 1720 Colonel Gledhill, who had recently succeeded 

 Colonel Moody as commandant, urged that his soldiers, who 

 had been reduced to a single company of forty men, should 

 be employed on making a road from Placentia to St. John's. 

 His suggestion, being a century before its time, was refused ; 

 and its refusal made him throw himself so energetically into 

 the r61e of trader, that English fishing and sack ships began 

 then to come. In 1727 forty-one English ships arrived in 



^^j%^^'^ Placentia and St. Pierre— half from Bideford and Barnstaple, 

 came, which had now lost their old shore fisheries on the east; 



a quarter from Jersey and Guernsey, which seem to have 

 succeeded the French vessels as purveyors of French brandy ; 

 and some from Poole, which was also busy on the new 



