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4. Newfoundland Settlement and Conflict
From Canadian History Portal - HCO
| B. Early European Explorers →→ 1. The Viking Saga to 1400 → 2. European Exploration and Colonies 1400-1650 → 3. English Trading Companies 1658-1750 → → 4. Newfoundland Settlement and Conflict →→ C. New France |
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Contents |
Discoveries & Claims
After the Norse left Vinland and Markland, at least four centuries passed before European mariners rediscovered Newfoundland and Labrador. Basque whalers hunting in the Labrador Sea may have been the first, followed by Portuguese fishermen.
In 1473, Joao Corte Real may have taken part in a Norwegian expedition to the Grand Banks and Newfoundland - he was later rewarded by the King of Portugal with the post of Governer of Terceira in the Azores for having discovered 'stockfish land'. In 1500, his son Gaspar, an acquaintance of Columbus, explored Labrador, and disappeared off Newfoundland in 1501.
The English were not far behind. In 1481, a secret expedition to the Grand Banks may have been mounted by the "Merchants of Bristol". But any attempt to keep the fishery secret was doomed to fail, and the English were pushed out for a time by Basque and Portuguese rival fleets.
The London and Bristol merchants were determined to exploit the rich fishery. They backed a voyage suggested by a Genoa-born mariner, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot). Cabot put the English venture on a sounder footing by claiming these "Newe Found Isles", with their waters teeming with cod, as the property of the King of England.
'Newfoundland' is Canada's oldest place name of European origin. September 20, 1503 saw the first use of the name in the Daybooks of King's Payments [fish tax rolls]. The following year, English fishermen established St. John's as a shore base. The city is the first English settlement in North America.
Other European nations followed the English. In 1506 Jean Denys from Honfleur landed on the Avalon Peninsula and established Le Havre de Jean Denys (Renews). Two years after this first official French voyage to North America, a fishing vessel 'Jacquette' returned to Rouen laden with the first French Grand Banks cod harvest.
For the first fifty years, the European fisheries at Newfoundland were inshore small-boat fisheries. The French did not begin to exploit the Grand Banks until the 1550s, and the English did not develop a banks fishery until after 1713. The Basques never set up settlements to support their operations; Basque whaling operations were strictly seasonal, and did not involve anything resembling “settlements”.
In 1520, Joao Alvarez Fagundes explored the south coast of Newfoundland and claimed it for the King of Portugal. In 1523 and 1524, Giovanni Verrazzano, a Florentine navigator sent by François I from Dieppe, explored up the Atlantic coast to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence, likely accompanied by a young navigator named Jacques Cartier, who may have started his exploration career with voyages to Brazil.
King Henry VIII was determined to strengthen the English presence in America and find a passage to Asia around or through North America. In 1527, he sent one of his navy captains John Rut on the Mary Guildford and the Samson on an expedition of discovery. The Samson was lost in a storm on the coast of Labrador, but Rut carried on his mapping, and later explored as far south as Florida. In August, 1527, in the first recorded letter from Canada, and from the New World to the Old, he reported to Henry VIII about conditions in Labrador and Newfoundland, noting that there were 14 French and Portuguese fishing vessels in St. John's harbour.
Gilbert & The First English Colonies
Fishing fleets swarmed to Newfoundland and Labrador in search of cod and whales, and by 1550, the Bristol merchants were mounting annual fishing expeditions to Grand Banks. The Portuguese and Basques also set up shore settlements to manufacture whale oil. On September 7, 1572, at Chateau Bay, Labrador, an anonymous Basque fisherman bought four scallops - this is Canada's earliest recorded business transaction. Another Canadian first happened on December 24, 1584, at Carol's Cove, near Red Bay, Labrador, when Basque whaler Joanes de Echaniz dictated his last will and testament. It is the oldest surviving will in Canadian history.
An experienced colonizer of Ireland, Gilbert was an early publicist for exploring and colonizing for the English Empire. The half brother of Elizabeth's favourite Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert was knighted in 1570 for his service in the campaigns in Ireland. His 1576 Discourse about the North West Passage inspired the voyages of Martin Frobisher and John Davis.
Gilbert's first attempt was frustrated by poor organization, desertion and bad weather, but in 1583, he left Plymouth on a second voyage with five ships; Delight, Raleigh, Golden Hind, Swallow and Squirrel. He carried a charter from the Queen to search for the Northwest Passage, and a patent from the English crown to explore and colonize America, especially 'Norumbega', the area around the Gulf of Maine.
On August 5, 1583, Gilbert entered St. John's harbour, and read out a Royal Charter, claiming the lands 200 miles around St. John's for Elizabeth I, thereby founding the first English colony in North America. One of his first acts as Governor was to grant shore rights to 36 foreign fishing vessels.
On August 21, one of his ships, The Delight, with 85 persons aboard, foundered on the banks of Sable Island; only 12 men were rescued. It was the first Canadian shipwreck on record.
On September 9, Gilbert himself lost his life returning from Newfoundland when his little 10-ton frigate Squirrel was wrecked in a storm off the Azores; his reputed last words are, 'We are as near to heaven by sea as by land!'
In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh renewed Humphrey Gilbert's patent to explore North America, but Raleigh's interests lay further south than Newfoundland, in the colony that came to be known as Virginia.
The Cupids Colony
The Newfoundland Company that backed John Guy's colony at Cupids, wanted a colony that would permit a more efficient fishery, with overwintering crews. Richard Whitbourne, in his Discourse and Discovery of Newfoundland (1620), also defended colonization as a way of "converting the Inhabitants to Christianitie" and helping England get rid of its "superabounding multitudes".
The Cupids colonists were able to grow vegetables but not grain, and in the hard winter of 1613 did they did not have enough hay to feed their animals. They also had to pay protection money to Peter Easton the Pirate Admiral. Easton had arrived in Newfoundland in 1602 and soon turned to piracy. From his bases at Harbour Grace and Ferryland, he roamed the Atlantic from the Caribbean to Newfoundland and as far east as the Azores. During one raid he took possession of 30 English, Portuguese and Jersey ships in St. John's harbour, and captured Richard Whitbourne, the sheriff dispatched from England to arrest him and bring justice to Newfoundland.
John Guy withdrew from the Newfoundland Company in 1615, and never returned, although his son Nicholas moved with his family to nearby Bristol's Hope. To deal with pirates, the Company replaced Guy with mariner John Mason, but Mason moved to New England in 1621 and the Cupids settlement dispersed.
The Newfoundland Company then sold off their property to various proprietors who organized colonies - Sir William Vaughan at Renews, Sir George Calvert at Ferryland, and William Payne and others at St. John's. In 1618 Vaughan hired fishing master Richard Whitbourne to bring Welsh colonists and provisions to Renews (Aquaforte), but the colony was looted by deserters from Sir Walter Raleigh's Guiana fleet. Vaughan then sold off the Ferryland area to Sir George Calvert and the Fermeuse lot to Henry Cary, Lord Falkland. Falkland's promoters made generous offers of land to those who would settle and work in the fishery. There were few takers.
The Avalon Colony
Sir George Calvert, a wealthy Irish landowner, sent off a group of colonists to Ferryland in 1621, under the leadership of Captain Edward Wynne (or Winne). In April 1623 King James I granted Calvert "the Province of Avalon", and by 1627 there were about 100 men and women living at Ferryland, when Calvert - now Lord Baltimore - visited his colony for the first time. He returned in 1628 with a baronial household of 40 family and servants, plus two Catholic priests to inhabit the Mansion that Wynne had built for him. After a miserable winter, and threats from local French privateer de la Rade, Baltimore and his wife returned to their estates in Ireland, satisfied "to committ this place to fishermen".
On August 19, 1629,he wrote King Charles I, explaining why he wanted to leave Avalon and 'remove' himself to Virginia, because, "from the middest of October to the middest of May there is a sad face of winter upon all this land, both sea and land so frozen for the greatest part of the time as they are not penetrable, no plant or vegetable thing appearing out of the earth until it be about the beginning of May, nor fish in the sea, besides the air so intolerable cold as it is hardly to be endured."
Baltimore and his wife went on to acquire another, warmer province in Chesapeake Bay that they named Maryland, having spend over £20,000 on the Colony of Avalon (about $4 million in today's money).
One of the priests stayed at the Colony of Avalon after 1629, marking the first continuous Roman Catholic ministry in British North America. Calvert had secured the right of Catholics to practice their religion in the new colony, and wrote the novel principle of religious tolerance, into the Charter of Avalon, making it the first North American colony to practice religious tolerance.
Most of the Calvert properties were taken over in 1637 by the Company of Adventurers to Newfoundland, whose agent, David Kirke (c1597-1654) was appointed first Governor of Newfoundland, and co-proprietor of the Colony with the Marquis of Hamilton and Earls Pembroke & Holland.
Ten years earlier, Kirke had been commissioned by King Charles I to attack the French in Canada, and in July 1629, he and his brothers captured Quebec from Samuel de Champlain. He remained in Canada until 1632 and was knighted in 1633.
The Company of Adventurers to Newfoundland were to have "Power to admit Merchants into their Partnership", and rights to "the sole trade of the Newfoundland, the Fishing excepted". A London business run by Kirkes brothers John and James (Kirke, Barkeley and Co) was the commercial agent of the company, and supplied goods to the local fishermen in return for dried fish.
Kirke brought out the first 100 colonists from England, and built forts at Ferryland, St. John's and Bay de Verde to control the Grand Banks fishery. He ran into some conflict with an English fishing company, the company of Western Adventurers, who wanted to keep people from settling so they could better control the fish trade.
But the colonists prevailed, and on January 1, 1638, King Charles I granted a Coat of Arms to the Newfoundland Colony. It featured a silver cross set on a red field, two English lions, two Scottish unicorns, and an elk, probably meant to be a caribou. The arms are supported on each side by Beothuks - "a savage of the area armed and habited as for war.
The motto "Quaerite prime regnum Dei"("Seek ye first the kingdom of God") was from the Bible, Matthew 7, 23. The existence of this coat of arms was in time forgotten. It was rediscovered in the 1920s, and officially adopted by the Dominion of Newfoundland.
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The victory of Cromwell in the English Civil War (1642-1648) doomed the Royalist Kirke, and in 1651 his estates were "sequestrated". Three of his aristocratic co-adventurers also died, two of them by hanging. He was recalled to London in 1651 to face a suit by Cecil Calvert, second Baron Baltimore, and died there in 1654, possibly in the Southwark jail.
Kirke's widow Sara and her eldest son George continued to manage the colony at Ferryland, and her sons developed their own plantations there and at Renews. Census figures from the 1660s and 1670s reveal that Lady Kirke owned more fish stages, boats and train (cod liver oil) vats and employed more servants (fishermen and fish processors) than any other planter on the English shore. She died sometime in the early 1680s.
The Newfoundland colonists - called "planters" - were tenacious, and held on in spite of attacks from fishing crews and pirates. The Committee for Trade and Plantations urged them to leave, as they could not expect any military protection. On January 27, 1675, Charles II chartered a new Newfoundland company; but disallowed settlement and the cutting down of trees near the shore. But Commodore Sir John Berry visited the settlements, and advised the Committee that King William III’s Act of 1699 confirmed the inhabitant’s rights to their plantations. The settlers, he argued, were a bulwark against the French, and could also keep fishery property ashore over the winter.
The French in Newfoundland
Jacques Cartier was likely the first prominent French navigator to land at Newfoundland, on a voyage with Verrazano. In 1534, he made the crossing from St-Malo to Newfoundland in just 20 days. He explored the Baie des Chateaux - the Strait of Belle Isle - which he hoped was the beginning of a river leading to China. He found the north shore coast extremely bleak, with 'not even 'a cartful of earth', and said of it, 'I believe that this was the land God gave to Cain'.
But Cartier also witnessed the riches of the cod fishery - the fish were so thick, he related, that "they slowed our ships in the water."
On June 11, he and his crew celebrated the first recorded Catholic mass in North America, at Brest Harbour, used by cod fishermen for wood and water.
On this voyage, he claimed Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the lands adjacent for the King of France François I.
Six years later, in 1541, François I appointed Jean-François de la Rocque, Sieur de Roberval c1500-1560 the first Viceroy of Canada, Newfoundland, and Labrador, and made Cartier a subordinate; the following June at St. John's, Cartier refused Roberval's order to join him, and returned to France.
In 1598 French King Henri IV awarded the Marquis de La Roche seigneurial ownership and the trading monopoly of New France; appointing him Lieutenant General of Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Fishermen from Normandy, Brittany and the Basque country of Gascony had exploited Newfoundland waters since the early 1500s, and some began to overwinter in Placentia Bay. After 1655, the French crown decided to sponsor a colony, and in 1660, a party of French settlers and soldiers led by La Rochelle sea captain Nicholas Gargot, landed at Placentia and fortified the harbour.
Breton fish merchants objected to the project, but Louis XIV's administrators wanted to fix French claims, and in 1662 sent out 30 soldiers and a few settlers under Governor Du Perron. Some of the soldiers mutinied and Du Perron, his chaplain and ten others were killed. In 1663, 20 more soldiers and 20 fishermen with their families arrived to reinforce the colony. In the 1670s, Governor La Pioppe reorganized the colony and put it on a stronger footing.
When King William's War broke out in 1692, French troops from Plaisance moved to capture and burn St. John's. In September of 1696, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and his naval commander Simon-Pierre Denys de Bonaventure arrived at Plaisance to begin a campaign to drive the English out of Newfoundland. They captured the armed English warship Newport near St. John's, and in late November, d'Iberville marched across the Avalon Peninsula to capture, loot and burn St. John's and the Kirkes' settlement at Ferryland.
The three Kirke brothers were captured and imprisoned for ransom at Placentia. Two died there, and the third at St. John's a short time later, ending the Kirke era in Newfoundland.
D'Iberville's efforts were for nothing. The following year, 1697, France and England signed Treaty of Ryswick, under which all places captured during the war were to be mutually restored; France returned York Factory to the Hudson's Bay Company and St. John's and other Newfoundland prizes to the British in exchange for French ownership of Acadia.
Settlement & Conflict
Because of the increasing value of the cod fishery, and battles between fishing companies for advantage, this peace lasted less then a decade. In 1704, a mixed force of French and Native Americans operating out of Placentia besieged the English settlement at Bonavista, and destroyed it on Aug. 29. With the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, Philippe Pasteur de Costebelle, the Governor of Placentia, led a company of 170 French troops against St. John's in 1708; they captured and destroyed the English settlement, bringing the eastern coastline of North America under French control. But Costebelle did not have the resources to keep the French position, and a year later he ordered St. John's abandoned to the English.
In 1712 Francis Nicholson 1665-c1728 was appointed Governor of Nova Scotia and Placentia (Newfoundland). At the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, France recognized the British title to Hudson Bay, and ceded Acadia and Newfoundland to Britain, but kept fishing rights. The French settlers and fishermen of Plaisance (Placentia) relocated to Isle Royale (Cape Breton Island), where the fortress of Louisbourg was built to protect the French fisheries and the sea lanes to Quebec.
On June 1, 1714, Philippe Pasteur de Costebelle officially surrendered Placentia to the English under Captain John Moody, and moved to Cape Breton (Ile Royale) with the settlers and fishermen.
Peace returned with the British governance of Newfoundland. In 1726, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel established the first school in Newfoundland at Bonavista. it was a school for the poor.
In 1729, Henry Osborn 1694-1771 was appointed the first naval Governor of Newfoundland. He set up a police force and six administrative districts. The system of naval rulers lasted until 1841.
With the outbreak of the Seven Years War, France was to lose both Louisbourg and Quebec to the British. 1762 saw one final act in the battle between the European powers when Charles de Ternay 1723-1780 captured Fort William at St. John's on July 27. When news reached Louisbourg, William Colville, Lord Amherst, left with about 1,500 British and American troops to retake St. John's. They landed at Torbay, north of St. John's, on September 15, and drove the French back into the fort two days later. On September 18, French commandant Joseph d'Haussonville surrendered Fort William. It was the last French-English battle in North America.
On February 10, 1763, France signed the Peace of Paris ending the Seven Years War. France gave up all claims to Canada, keeping only the fishing islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon south of Newfoundland, plus part of Louisiana, which it sold to Spain in 1803.
At the same time, Spain ceded its claims in the northwest [present day Oregon and BC], and was awarded full ownership of California.
| Newfoundland Settlement and Conflict - Gallery | Stories & Texts | Web Links | Milestones | Student Activities | Student Projects |
| B. Early European Explorers →→ 1. The Viking Saga to 1400 → 2. European Exploration and Colonies 1400-1650 → 3. English Trading Companies 1658-1750 → → 4. Newfoundland Settlement and Conflict →→ C. New France |
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