272 THE OCEAN RIVER 



porary nature — of the English reverting to a strict governmen- 

 tal control of far colonies such as the Spanish used with such 

 ill success in the Caribbean. 



As a result of this quarrel in the north, the New England 

 fishermen moved in on the Banks with over 600 vessels and 

 4,000 seamen. Only half as many men as employed by Britain 

 caught an equal number of fish. The growth of the New Eng- 

 land population and its skill, daring, and independence, out- 

 paced the application of similar preventive measures until the 

 mother country was unequal to the task. As for the whole his- 

 tory of the misbegotten policy in Newfoundland, Edmund 

 Burke said in 1766: ''The most valuable trade we have in the 

 world is with Newfoundland,'' but he also broke out in anguish 

 over the costliness of the policies in these words: ''Good God! 

 What sums the nursing of the ill-thriven, hard-visaged and ill- 

 favored brat has cost this wittol nation. Sir, this colony has 

 stood us in a sum of not less than seven hundred thousand 

 pounds.'' This was a fair indictment of a policy that helped 

 England lose all her American colonies by an inability to read 

 the course of natural events, namely, the population of a wil- 

 derness and the harvesting of the wild waters of the sea by 

 Englishmen transplanted to new strength and independence. 



At the end of the seventeenth century the shores of North 

 America were growing a people from Europe who would 

 and did turn about toward the tracks of the Ocean River and 

 build their strength on it with codfish and trade spanning 

 the world. The age of the domination of sea power was at 

 hand. As Parry puts it: "The ships which sought the northern 

 passages and opened the trade with Russia; the expeditions 

 which began the settlement of North America; the English 

 and the Dutch fleets which defeated the navies of Spain, were 

 largely manned by sailors trained in the hard school of the 

 Banks fisheries." These victories opened up the New England 

 mainland to a flood of English artisans who were dissenters 



