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- 
