144 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



ceeded N. Darby as representative of another Bristol firm, 

 and lived in Labrador, either in Charles Harbour (1770-5) 

 or one hundred miles further north in Sandwich Bay (1774- 

 86), off and on, with an odd retinue of maidservants, Irish 

 labourers, and English convicts, for sixteen years. American 

 privateers plundered him in 1778 ; and before he left, Messrs. 

 Noble and Pinson's fishermen and trappers pursued and 

 harried him, on every river-bank; two Englishmen passed 

 him and wintered still further north at Hamilton Inlet 

 (1777-8); French Canadians wintered by his side in Sand- 

 wich Bay while on their way to settle in Hamilton Inlet 

 (1785-6); and he saw Messrs. Slade of Poole sealing along 

 the shores of Labrador, 1773 et seq., and other Poole-men, 

 who, having been driven by the Declaration of Versailles 

 (1783) from the fisheries and factories, which they had set up 

 at Sop Arm, on White Bay (1762), settled on the north 

 shore of Belle Isle Strait.^ Dartmouth, Poole, and Canada 

 began to press Bristol with their competition. 



It was about the same time that Jerseymen set up large 

 fishing establishments with resident superintendents and clerks 

 at Blanc Sablon and its neighbourhood, on the borders of 

 what is now Quebec Province. Establishments of the Channel 

 Islanders now ran like a ring around the whole Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence, from Cape Breton Island and Prince Edward 

 Island to Bay Chaleurs and Gasp^, and back again along the 

 north shore of the Gulf to Belle Isle, serving as rallying- 

 points to the dispossessed Acadians, and as mediating links 

 between the old-English and new-French subjects of the 

 British Crown. After the Treaty of Paris Jerseymen and 

 Guernseymen repeated on a larger scale the political services 

 which they rendered at Placentia after the Treaty of Utrecht. 

 All or almost all these new settlers in Labrador were either 

 Newfoundlanders, or came from the same stock as those who 

 had peopled Newfoundland ; the settlements were for fishing, 



1 George Coxiyf x'lghX, /ottrnalf vol. iii, p. 199. 



