194 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



residents have minded and mended boats. Similarly, in the 

 principal harbours, except in Placentia and a very few 

 other favoured places, 'Nature has denied (the principal 

 harbours) favourable beaches for drying the fish, and thus 

 expensive establishments of curing houses, stages, and ways 

 have to be kept up,' ^ or, as in old time, to be created and 

 destroyed every year. Resident caretakers were required for 

 flakes and stages as well as for boats, in order to prevent waste, 

 and those fared best who recognized this necessity. But 

 caretaking could scarcely be described as work, and the idle- 

 ness of winter became the curse, just as the energy of summer 

 became the blessing, which Providence, impersonated by the 

 cod, bestowed upon the country ; and the only reason why 

 idleness did not lead to starvation was because the capitalist 

 came to the rescue and persuaded the residents to rely during 

 winter on credit for their daily bread. The remedy had its 

 drawbacks, but the only alternative remedies were pauper 

 relief, which would have been worse, or thrift, which was not 

 available. The cod made its pursuers half-timers; and 

 palliatives, but not cures, for periodic unemployment were 

 furnished by resident caretakers, and by capitalism on an 

 inchoate and tentative scale. In spite of these palliatives, 

 winter pauperism was the baneful influence with which the 

 cod afflicted its devotees, and in the Sixties it happened once 

 that one-fourth of the entire public revenue was spent on pauper 

 relief.^ The conditions of the cod-fishery indirectly modified 

 the evils which it directly created; but these evils were only 

 removable by things which had nothing to do with cod-fish. 

 Antidotes were furnished in the early history of the colony by 

 trapping and boat-building, then by seal and salmon, and in 

 this century partly by the incipient land industries which were 

 discussed in the last chapter, but mainly by subsidiary marine 

 industries, which have already attained considerable im- 



^ Bonnycastle, op. cit., vol. ii, p. i68. 



2 Accounts and Papers, 1866, vol. xlix, p. 399, No. 3719 1. 



