Newfoundland and the Jingoes: An Appeal to England's Honor

by John Fretwell

When the French, under D'Iberville, captured St. John's, and all Newfoundland lay at their feet, the solitary exception was the little Island of Carbonear in Conception Bay, where the persecuted settler John Pynn and his gallant band still held aloft the British flag. In 1704-5 St. John's was again laid waste by the French, under Subercase; and, although Colonel Moody successfully defended the fort, the town was burned, and all the settlements about Conception Bay were raided by the French and their Indian allies. But Pynn and Davis bravely and successfully defended their island Gibraltar in Conception Bay.

In 1708 Saint Ovide surprised and captured St. John's, but again old John Pynn held the fort at Carbonear.

In the American War one of Pynn's descendants, a clerk at Harbor Grace, raised a company of grenadiers from Conception Bay; and they fought with such success in Canada that he was knighted as Sir Henry Pynn, and raised to the rank of general. But the selfish government at home cared nothing for Newfoundland. The first Congress of the United States, Sept. 5, 1774, forbade all exports to the British possessions. This would not have hurt Newfoundland if the settlers had been allowed to carry on agricultural pursuits there. But these had always been discouraged by the English; and so they were dependent on the New England States for their supplies, and were threatened with absolute famine as soon as the war broke out. Had they been disloyal, they might have gained their rights from England; but their very loyalty to such a government was their worst misfortune.

Even in 1783 the Englishman had not learned the evil results of permitting royal interference in British politics. It is not merely in the reigns of the libertine kings that we see this. Queen Elizabeth injured England by interfering with the policy of its wisest statesmen. The ascendency of Harley and Saint John Bolingbroke, who deserted England's allies and threw away the fruits of Marlborough's victories, was due to the influence of a High Church waiting-woman over Queen Anne; and now, when even Lord North, to say nothing of the better class of Englishmen, disapproved of George III.'s obstinate resistance to the just claims of the American colonies, the support given to the king by the Tories led to the loss of a dominion far more valuable to England than all the trade of India or China.

He was obliged to call on a Liberal minister to undo, as far as possible, the evil done by himself and the Tories, just as in later days Mr. Gladstone had to settle with the United States the damage done by the Tories in the "Alabama" question.

The death of Rockingham left the direction of the negotiations with France and the United States in the hands of Lord Shelburne; and that he was extremely liberal in his arrangements with both countries was not to be wondered at. The wrong had been done by England; and the innocent English had to suffer, as well as the guilty ones. Unfortunately for Newfoundland, Shelburne did not cede this island to the United States; and so it had to bear more than its share in the misfortunes which the policy of King George had brought upon the British empire.

Mr. Spearman (page 411) writes that "Adams, the United States envoy, himself bred up among the New England fishermen, said 'he would fight the war all over again' rather than give up the ancestral right of the New Englanders to the Newfoundland fisheries"; but that Shelburne should be able, when France and America were victorious, to take away from the former power the concessions made to it by the Tories in 1713 and in 1763 was not to be expected.

There was a slight alteration in the shore line on which the French might fish. They abandoned that right between Cape Bonavista and Cape St. John, in consideration of being allowed to catch and dry their fish along the shore between Point Riche and Cape Ray. That was all; and that is precisely the reason why the Beaconsfield-Salisbury cabinet, in 1878, refused their sanction to the Bay St. George Railroad.

The only advantage that the poor Newfoundlanders gained from the war which caused them so much distress was the fact that the English government was whipped into conceding to their Roman Catholic population some of the rights which for many years afterwards it obstinately withheld from their brethren in Ireland.

In 1784 Vice-Admiral John Campbell, a man of liberal, enlightened spirit, was appointed governor, and issued an order that all persons inhabiting the island were to have full liberty of conscience, and the free exercise of all such modes of religious worship as were not prohibited by law.