Migration, Arrival, and Settlement before the Great Famine

Newfoundland was the site of the first large-scale permanent Irish Catholic settlement in British North America. Poetically named Talamh an Eisc, “the land of fish,” Newfoundland was a haven for Irish Catholic sailors and merchants from the southeastern Irish counties of Wexford and Kilkenny, in Leinster, and from Waterford, southern Tipperary, and eastern Cork, in Munster, as early as the sixteenth century. It is estimated that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, roughly 90 percent of Newfoundland’s Irish Catholic migrants came from within a sixty-kilometre radius of the port of Waterford. At first the migration was seasonable in this “colony built around a fishery.” Single men and merchants engaged in the summer fishery, established temporary settlements on the Newfoundland coast, and returned to Ireland for the winter. In December 1767, for example, it was reported that four to five thousand men had returned to Waterford from Newfoundland at the end of the fishing season. But by the late eighteenth century, Irish Catholic sojourners were being joined by increasing numbers of permanent migrants; their small villages, specializing in the dry fishery, retained strong ties to southeastern Ireland, providing a source of cod for the British Isles as well as a market for Waterford’s merchants and a terminus for continued Irish migration.

In the sixty years after 1770, some 30,000 Irish, most of whom were Catholics, voluntarily migrated from southeastern Ireland to Newfoundland, a movement that contributed to the decision of the British government in 1824 to abandon its long-standing ban on settlement on the island. With the collapse of the provisions trade in the 1830s, Irish migration to Newfoundland virtually ended. By then, however, half of the island’s population was Irish (38,000), and the vast majority of these were Roman Catholic.

Although many Irish Catholic migrants to Newfoundland were farmers escaping the enclosure movement of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, most were unable to replicate their old agricultural ways in the New World. Because of the physical limitations of the terrain and the lure of the fishery, these former farmers, in contrast to their compatriots in other British North American colonies, engaged in small-scale subsistence gardening as a supplement to their principal occupation in the inshore fishery. Migrants were forced to adapt to rocky terrain, little arable land, extensive forests and scrub bush, and the daily demands – provision of boats, nets, and tools – of a maritime economy. Irish Catholics established themselves in small outport communities on the Avalon peninsula and particularly along the shores of Conception Bay. Those Irish Catholic migrants who were involved in the mercantile and provisioning trades, however, preferred settlement in the burgeoning entrepôt of St John’s. By 1814, 40 percent of the total Irish population lived in the Newfoundland capital.

Another significant difference between Irish Catholic Newfoundlanders and Irish Catholics in the other British North American colonies was their non-familial migration patterns. Most young men and women migrated as single persons, with the former sometimes twice the number of the latter. The fact that, in 1810, only 2.5 percent of Irish arrivals in St John’s were children also suggests that the nature of migration was not family-based. It appears that Irish Catholics married one another only after their arrival on the island. Whereas in such Irish towns as Inistioge, newlyweds usually hailed from villages no more than ten kilometres apart, once in Newfoundland Irish migrants frequently chose partners regardless of their Irish town of origin. Moreover, young single Irish men, when faced with a small pool of Irish Catholic women, preferred to remain single than marry an English Protestant.

The altered patterns of Irish Catholic marriage in Newfoundland certainly limited the re-creation of specific Irish cultures in the New World. Unlike Irish Catholics in American cities, Irish Catholic Newfoundlanders did not completely recreate clusters of settlement based on the close kinship patterns of the Old World. Catholic migrants from south Leinster and east Munster intermixed with one another regardless of parish or county of origin. Their Catholicism, rather than parochial ties, appears to have been the common binding agent for these migrants. At the same time, although Irish Catholics from southeast Leinster did not retain the kinship networks and agricultural lifestyle of their home villages, they did bring with them rich musical traditions, a distinctive accent that was recognizably south Leinster, fragments of the Irish language, and stories and folk customs indigenous to the southeast. In the broader picture, they constitute perhaps the most cohesive regional group of Irish Catholics in all of the British North American colonies. This group developed virtually on its own after 1830 and provided a base for continued migration to the other Atlantic colonies.