2l6 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NEWFOUNDLAND 



another, in Rouge, and Conche, and the chief of these was Croc.^ 



^^^^d^j' Hare Bay was ignored. The chief fishing-grounds of the 



north-east French lay south of Conche as far as Cape St. John, and on 



French base ^j^jg g^j-and Englishmen dwelt by twenties in twenty-three 

 was Croc. o j j 



coves in 1854. St. Pierre was the gathering-place of the 



fishing-ships from Bayonne — which was the port of the 

 Basque Provinces of France — and also from Dieppe, which is 

 in Normandy and more rarely from St. Malo. Croc was the 

 gathering place of the fishing-ships from St. Malo, St. Brieuc 

 and Nantes, which are in Brittany, and also from Granville and 

 Havre, which are in Normandy. The dividing line between 

 Breton and Basque was not so distinct as it was once, but it 

 was still discernible. The Bretons, as a rule, went straight 

 from France to the north and the dwellers on the Basque 

 coast went straight from France to the south of Newfound- 

 land, as they did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 

 the Breton sphere including the neighbourhood of St. Barbe. 

 In the extreme north-east Englishmen were little more than 

 caretakers for the French, and they came from a different 

 neighbourhood, and represented different stocks and interests 

 from those of the average westerner. Traders came not 

 from Nova Scotia, but from St. John's and Harbour Grace ; 

 like Labrador, St. Anthony was peopled from Carbonear; 

 and the oldest inhabitants at Quirpon of whom history makes 

 mention arrived there in 1814.^ The Frenchmen on the 

 north-east differed from the Frenchmen on the south-west; 

 the Englishmen on the north-east differed from the English- 

 men on the south-west ; and the relation of Englishmen to 

 Frenchmen was different on the north-east and south-west. 

 On the whole of the west coast, the Englishmen were not only 

 settlers but paramount. On the far north-east the French 

 visitors overshadowed the English settlers. A trial of strength 

 had taken place in 1830, when the Chamber of Commerce 



* Com p. ante, p, loi note. 



2 Church in the Colonies, 1849, No. 25, p. 90. 



