Mr. Spearman continues, "Frenchmen must understand that no Englishman will for a moment accept as a precedent anything in those two reigns affecting the relations of France and of England."
But here Mr. Spearman counts without his host. He should recollect that the British government has, since the death of Charles II., paid an annual pension to the Dukes of Richmond simply because they were descended from the Frenchwoman, Louise de la Querouaille, whose influence induced Charles II. to betray English interests to France, and that but the other day the Salisbury government recognized that precedent by paying the Duke of Richmond a very large sum of money to buy off this infamous claim. So long as the names of the Dukes of Richmond and Saint Alban's (both descendant of Charles II.'s mistresses) remain on the roll of the British Peerage, the Frenchman will have a right to laugh at Mr. Spearman's claim; for we cannot ignore a precedent in our intercourse with foreigners, so long as we act upon it in our domestic affairs.
Scarcely was Charles the Libertine seated on the throne of England, when the Frenchmen, in 1660, settled on the southern shore of Newfoundland, at a place which they called La Plaisance (now known as Placentia).
They were certainly either wiser or more fortunate in their choice of a location than the English; for, while St. John's and Ferryland, on the straight shore of Avalon, are exposed to the wildest gales of the Atlantic, and shut out by the arctic ice from all communication with the ocean for a part of the winter, Placentia is a protected harbor, open all the year round, and having a sheltered waterway navigable for the largest ships to the northernmost and narrowest part of the Isthmus of Avalon.
We must believe that the French would have managed Newfoundland better than the English if they had kept the island; for the men who cut the Isthmus of Suez would surely long ago have made a passage, three miles long, by which the ships of Trinity Bay might have found their way at the close of autumn to the safe winter harbors of the southern coast.
All along the southern shore the names on the map tell us of French occupation.
Port aux Basques, Harbor Breton, Rencontre Bay (called by the English Round Counter), Cape La Hune, Bay d'Espoir, are but a few of them.
The name which the English have given to this last is strangely characteristic. The Bay of Hope (Baie d'Espoir) of the French has been changed into the Bay of Despair of the English. It was really a Bay of Hope to the French; for from the head of one of its fiords, deep enough for the largest of our modern ships, an Indian trail goes northwards in less than 100 miles to the fertile valley of the Exploits River. Can we suppose that the French engineers would have allowed 200 years to elapse without building a road along this trail? And yet not a single road was built by the English conquerors before the year 1825; and even to-day, to reach the point where the Indian trail crosses the Exploits, we must travel 260 miles by rail from Placentia or St. John's instead of 100 from Bay d'Espoir, simply because the English holders of property in St. John's, like dogs in the manger, will not permit any improvement in the country, unless it can be made tributary to their special interests.
That the English were worse enemies of Newfoundland than the French, even in King Charles's time, may be seen from the advice given by Sir Josiah Child, the chairman of that great monopoly, the East India Company, that the island "was to have no government, nor inhabitants permitted to reside at Newfoundland, nor any passengers or private boat-keepers permitted to fish at Newfoundland."
The Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations adopted the suggestion of Sir Josiah; and in 1676, just a century before the American Declaration of Independence, the west country adventurers began to drive away the resident inhabitants, and to take possession of their houses and fishing stages, and did so much damage in three weeks that Thomas Oxford declared 1,500 men could not make it good.