24 LABRADOR 



fisheries was one of the lesser causes which helped to bring 

 about the American war, and it explains some episodes 

 in the naval history of the war. In 1774 Labrador was 

 given back to Canada. It was not until 1809 that it was 

 finally reannexed to Newfoundland. 



A trader who came to Labrador in 1770 was Major 

 George Cartwright. He had been aide-de-camp to the 

 Marquis of Granby in the Seven Years' War; but failing 

 to obtain promotion, he resigned his commission, and went 

 into business on the coast of Labrador. He has left us 

 his journals, in three large folio volumes. The great ma- 

 jority of the entries are trivial. "I went out a-shooting," 

 he says on September 29, 1772, "but saw nothing." Yet 

 the diary as a whole gives a vivid and minute account of 

 the life at a post on the Labrador in 1770. The drunken- 

 ness, the brutality, the license, are all depicted without 

 reticence. Cartwright, who was a man of magnificent 

 courage, treated the Irishmen and Indians under him like 

 slaves. "I gave MacCarthy," he says, " twenty-seven 

 lashes with a small dog-whip on his bare back, and in- 

 tended to have made up the number thirty-nine; but as 

 he then fainted, I stopped and released him: when he 

 thanked me on his knees for my lenity." "I broke the 

 stock of my Hanoverian rifle," he says at another time, "by 

 striking a dog with it." So far as women were concerned, 

 Cartwright's principles were frankly immoral. Yet he 

 was religious after the fashion of his day. On Easter 

 Sunday, he says, " I read prayers to my family both in the 

 forenoon and afternoon." And after a providential es- 

 cape from danger he writes: "We could attribute all these 

 things to nothing but the effect of the immediate interpo- 



