Arrival and Settlement to 1850

Newfoundland

Bristol merchants may have fished off Newfoundland even before John Cabot’s voyage of discovery in 1497. A number of plantation schemes were advanced by various commercial and noble interests in the seventeenth century but all eventually failed. Thereafter the British government accepted the view that the island could not effectively be colonized and, furthermore, that any attempts at settlement would interfere with the migratory fishery’s usefulness as an unofficial training ground for the British navy. In the long term, the development of a resident fishery did put an effective end to English activity in the industry, but this did not occur until the nineteenth century. Efforts to forbid settlement were of necessity only fitfully enforced, in part because of the difficulty of policing the scattered outports and the lack of a government on the scene, and partly because it was realized that some English presence was necessary to

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Source: Census of Canada

1891 and 1951: England and Wales

11856 2 1870 3 1841 41848 5 1844

Source: Census of Canada 1991: Ethnic Origin: The Nation, table 1A.

defend the eastern “English shore” from the French, who fortified Plaisance in 1662 and dispersed the existing English settlements at the end of that century.

The early fishery was essentially an inshore fishery but it was migratory in the sense that the English vessels beached or anchored for the season and fished from small boats, processing and curing the fish onshore. They then returned to England in the autumn. Some individuals prosecuted a “byeboat” fishery, taking passage seasonally but fishing on their own account and employing others, until a glutted market in the late 1780s and the ensuing war with France terminated this long-standing practice. It made sense to leave a complement of men on the island over the winter rather than commence the establishment anew every year, and, because of the difficulties of recruiting, overwintering servants hired for several years at a time became common by the 1760s. Nonetheless, the number needed ashore in the offseason was limited and some servants were simply abandoned on the island or encouraged to proceed to New England to save their masters the costs of passage home.

The English fishery that revived after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) was largely in the hands of southwest of England merchants. Devonshiremen responded to low inshore cod stocks by moving their fishery onto the Banks, employing large numbers of Irish and sending boats to sea for a week at a time. Partly as a consequence, the Devon merchants did not explore new coastal areas to the degree that their Dorset counterparts did, and their establishments continued to occupy the eastern shore of the Avalon peninsula from present-day St John’s down to what is now Renews. Dorset merchants, mostly from Poole, ventured west along the north shore and located in Fortune Bay on the south coast after their establishment on Saint-Pierre was returned to France in 1763. In the eighteenth century, shipbuilding and the salmon and seal fisheries joined the production of cod and cod oil as mainstays of this maritime economy. The Dorset firms were active on the north shore as far west as the Labrador coast by 1805.

Despite official insistence that it did not exist, the permanent population of the island had reached 10,000 by the mid-eighteenth century, doubled by 1815, and doubled again by 1830. The greatest period of permanent settlement began in 1785 and ended about 1830, with most of the early arrivals locating in and about St John’s and on the west side of Conception Bay where the topography was propitious for settlement. Much of this expansion proceeded as one or two families occupied new coves and fished inshore with imported servants.

Parish registers reveal that 45 percent of Newfoundland’s English came from Dorset and adjoining parts of Somerset and Hampshire and 35 percent from South Devon. These areas were the hinterlands respectively of Poole and of Dartmouth and Teignmouth, the centres from which the migratory fishery was organized. A trickle of emigrants also came from Bristol, London, and Liverpool, most locating in St John’s and Conception Bay. A number of those arriving from outside the major source regions were clergy, professionals, officials, or merchants. They were much more likely to be older and to bring families than were the young men engaged in the fishery.

Permanent settlement in Newfoundland cannot be explained by conditions on the island, for these were grim at best; nor can they be explained by deteriorating conditions at home, since there was no large-scale movement into the fishery as domestic industries in the west of England collapsed in the early nineteenth century. The answer lies in structural change within the fishery. By the late eighteenth century, English merchants were finding it profitable to leave the actual fishing to residents while they concentrated on supply and marketing, establishing regional trading centres that organized business with a number of fishing outports. But the shift from a migratory to a sedentary or resident-dominated fishery probably owed more to the wartime disruptions of seasonal migration in the years 1756–63, 1775–83, and 1793–1815. For individuals, the increasingly residential nature of the fishery provided greater incentive and opportunity to marry and remain, and deteriorating opportunities at home diminished the incentive to return to England. In the closing years of the Napoleonic Wars, the labour shortage created by the wartime cessation of seasonal migration greatly increased the movement of people to Newfoundland despite the shipping hazards; these immigrants were recruited mostly in Ireland but were carried on Devon ships. The post-war depression caused an exodus of poor Irish from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, but the economy recovered in the 1820s and immigration from Ireland and England to Newfoundland resumed, though at reduced levels.

Women played a central role in the fixing of a permanent population in Newfoundland. By reason of their small number, domestics, widows, and the daughters of “planters” tended to marry quickly and remain; thus families who retired to England often left married daughters behind. Fifteen percent of women married below the age of 15, two-thirds by 20, and 90 percent by 25, in contrast to 7 percent and 35 percent of men in the latter two categories. It proved necessary to import women continuously to replace the domestics who left service so promptly. More Irish than English women came, recruited like the men by West Country shipping that touched in southern Ireland, and they absorbed many English into the island’s Irish population through intermarriage and conversion to Catholicism. This accounts in part for the proliferation of Devonshire names in many Catholic communities in the southern Avalon peninsula. Though there were only ten women for every fifty males in the 1780s, island-born women were already the major source of brides, with most marrying early and residing locally while their brothers migrated elsewhere. By 1800 the most common family structure was a household headed by an immigrant man and island-born woman. Employment in the Newfoundland fishery occupied an early stage in adult life for young Englishmen, with 75 percent arriving on the island between the ages of 16 and 30. Unless they married they usually left in under a decade, returning to earlier trades or agriculture or becoming mariners based in the homeland.

As the island became able to supply its own labour for the domestic fishery, St John’s mercantile houses began taking over the supply and marketing functions from the British houses, operating through a network of outport agents. Some of the English firms shifted the management of their businesses to St John’s where their personnel became prominent in the politics of the island. At the same time, with British trade increasingly reoriented around steamer traffic out of the larger ports, the island’s commercial links by the mid-nineteenth century were concentrated upon Glasgow, Liverpool, and London. Liverpool became the major port for the much-reduced English immigration to Newfoundland, though the southwest of England continued to supply immigrants into the 1870s.