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In grateful memory of Colin (J.C.) Davis, 1940-1921
0.2 A ‘nursery of seamen’
2.1 James Cook’s and Michael Lane’s ‘General Chart of the Island of Newfoundland’
2.2 St John’s Harbour entrance
5.1
6.1
6.2
PREFACE
When working on an earlier study of British admirals I became aware of flag officers’ governorship of Newfoundland but was not able to pursue it in that context. This book builds on the earlier study, but it focuses on the professional and political attitudes and ideas that naval governors of Newfoundland brought to the civil and military government of the settlement during the French (and American) Wars, 1793–1815. It considers naval government in a critical period in the early modern history of Newfoundland when the old established settlement was transitioning from being a largely migratory fishery, valued by the Admiralty and British governments as a ‘nursery of seamen’, to a settlement where the fishery was conducted by a resident population. By 1815 its demography and economy had come to resemble a nascent settler colony rather than a maritime work camp and a movement emerged on the Island promoting constitutional changes which were to bring an end to naval government.
In writing this book I have benefitted from a range of demographic, economic, social and political studies of eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century Newfoundland, including those which consider the settlement in relation to the British Atlantic world, and have also utilized work on the role of the late Georgian Navy in the French Wars and the contemporary British Empire. I have drawn heavily on primary sources held in the UK National Archives, the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador and Memorial University Library, St John’s. The holdings at the Caird Library at Greenwich include personal papers relating to some of the flag officers who are the subject of this study. On occasion I have supplemented these sources with material gathered while working on the earlier book.
In late 2019 and early 2020 I was able to read a range of Admiralty and Colonial Office papers in the UK National Archives and the Caird Library. Although prolonged Covid-related travel restrictions and general uncertainty over longdistance international air travel have prevented me from visiting Newfoundland, Newfoundland repositories provide online access to extensive bodies of primary material. The main Colonial Office Series for the period (CO 194) is available online through the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University, St John’s. It would take remarkable orthoptic fortitude to read all the wartime volumes in digitized form, but this source has proved invaluable for checking and follow-up purposes. The electronic collections at Memorial also include the typewritten transcriptions of official documents made by the Mss D’Alberti (the D’Alberti Papers) which are held in the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador. These transcriptions, which have been widely used by historians, are from a source now referred to as the ‘Colonial Secretary’s Letterbook’. As Newfoundland was not
a colony until 1824, the wartime papers in this series are those of the governors’ secretaries. There is significant overlap with CO 194, but the series also includes material that, as it did not relate to governors’ relationship with the secretary of state in London, was not included in their extensive correspondence with the colonial office. A comparative analysis of the D’Alberti Papers and a finding list for the Colonial Secretary’s Letterbook volumes through to 1800 and a sample check of the texts suggest that the transcripts are accurate and comprehensive.
Those working on aspects of late Georgian Newfoundland history owe a great debt to the institutions and individuals who have facilitated the digitization of such extensive holdings of primary material. The circumstances under which this study has been conducted make my debt a particularly heavy one, and I am very pleased to have this opportunity to express my gratitude to them. The institutions include the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland Labrador in St John’s and Memorial University’s St John’s and Grenfell campuses. A key personal role has been played over the years by Professor Olaf Janzen of the History Department at the Grenfell Campus. He has taken the lead in projects which have resulted in student researchers producing invaluable finding lists of the Colonial Secretary’s Letterbook to 1800 and the CO 194 series through to 1858. Professor Janzen has also written a series of admirably succinct and comprehensive ‘readers guides’ to Newfoundland history which are available online through Memorial University.
I am very grateful to Professor Janzen for his advice and for directing me to the online sources available at St John’s. Mrs Melanie Tucker of the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador responded with efficiency, forbearance and courtesy to a long train of enquiries and facilitated copies of material from the Duckworth Papers held there. Ms Colleen Field, Head of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies, Memorial University, responded very promptly to resolve a problem with my online access to the Centre’s DAI Colonial Collections. Dr Bethany Hamblen, Archivist and Records Manager, Balliol College, Oxford, kindly granted me access to its archives. I also thank staff members at the British Library, the Caird Library, the UK National Archives and the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester for their assistance when I was reading at these institutions. Mr Ian Bates helped me obtain a copy of his valuable biography of Sir Erasmus Gower and provided advice on an illustration. Mr Jerry Cranford, the Publisher at Flanker Press, St John’s, and the author very kindly allowed me to use a map of the east coast of Newfoundland which first appeared in Keith Mercer’s Rough Justice (2021). I am most grateful to my niece Rosie Morrow for her advice and assistance in enhancing the quality of 3 images used in the book.
As in the past, work in British libraries and archives has been leavened by interludes of relaxation with friends and family living in England. In this case, I’m particularly pleased to acknowledge the warm and generous hospitality of my old friends Pete and Issy Mahoney in Southsea in February 2020 and my brother Peter and his wife Rachel at their home in Suffolk in November 2019 and February 2020.
I began work on this project when I was still a staff member at the University of Auckland and would like to record my deep gratitude to the then vice chancellor, the late Emeritus Professor Stuart McCutcheon. Stuart authorized the university’s
financial support for archival work in London and warmly encouraged my ongoing research work when I reported to him as a member of the vice chancellor’s office. I very much regret that Stuart’s death in early 2023 means that I will be unable to present him with a copy as a token of my gratitude and respect. Susan McDowellWatts and Pip Anderson, my executive assistants in the vice chancellor’s office, provided invaluable support for research-related travel and helped organize and copy documents. As with earlier projects, I would like to record my appreciation for the excellent service provided through the University of Auckland Library and for the continuing willingness of staff members to respond to my requests for guidance and book purchases.
Earlier versions of this book have been reviewed by two sets of publishers’ readers. I am happy to acknowledge the benefits I have gained from their reports in completing the project. I am grateful to my previous editor Emily Drewe of Bloomsbury Academic for drawing this project to the attention of her colleague Maddie Holder, the World History Editor at the Press. It has been a pleasure to work with Maddie and her assistant Megan Harris in bringing the book through to publication.
My great friend and colleague Jonathan Scott of the University of Auckland has shown encouraging interest in this project from its inception and has been warmly supportive through its vicissitudes. He has also read various versions of the manuscript and commented on them with great insight and sympathy. I owe him a great deal. The same is true of my wife Di. She has read the whole book and commented on it and has, as ever, provided great support and encouragement. I am especially grateful to Jonathan and Di for sparing time from their own research and writing projects to assist me with mine.
The final personal debt that I wish to record here is to Colin Davis, an outstanding historian, a warm friend, a sure guide and a generous supporter. I knew Colin for more than forty years, and during all that time he served as a source of scholarly inspiration and great practical help and wisdom in all aspects of my academic life. Although his health was failing at the time, he asked to see a preliminary paper that I had written on one of the naval governors and provided an insightful response to it. This act of kindness, which epitomized Colin’s generosity of spirit, encouraged me to think that the wider topic was worth pursuing. It is a privilege, though one tinged with sadness, to dedicate what developed from that paper to Colin’s memory.
John Morrow
Devonport
New
Zealand
1 December 2022
NOTE ON NAVAL AND OFFICIAL TERMINOLOGY
The Admiralty Board
The Royal Navy was under the direction of seven lords commissioners of the Admiralty, known collectively as the ‘Board of Admiralty’ and usually referred to as the ‘Admiralty Board’ or simply ‘the Board’. It was headed by the first lord who sat in the Cabinet, the body that determined the strategy which the Board implemented. The Board was made up of ‘civil’ commissioners and either three or four ‘naval’ or ‘professional’ members. The former were political figures but sometimes included a commissioner who had been a very senior civil servant. The latter were serving members of the Royal Navy, sometimes senior captains but usually of ‘flag’ rank. Most of the first lords in the war years were politicians, but on two occasions the Board was headed by senior naval officers: Admiral, Lord St Vincent (1801–4) and Admiral, Lord Barham (1804–6). The civilian first lords were: the Earl of Chatham (1788–94), Earl Spencer (1794–1801), Lord Melville (1804–5), Viscount Howick (1806), Thomas Grenville (1806–7), Lord Mulgrave (1807–10), Philip Yorke (1810–12) and 2nd Lord Melville (1812–27).
Flag Officers
When they were commanding fleets, squadrons or land-based stations, the ships of the most senior officers of the Royal Navy flew a flag denoting their rank and the squadron to which they belonged. ‘Commodores’ were senior captains who were given temporary flag rank if the scale of their responsibilities warranted it. The permanent flag officers were divided on the basis of ascending seniority into rear admirals, vice admirals and admirals, with each rank being divided by ascending seniority into blue, white and red squadrons. Squadron designations had once referred to divisions of a single fleet, but by the French Wars, when there were numerous fleets, they denoted seniority within a flag rank: thus rear admirals of the Blue, White or Red squadrons. Newly promoted flag officers were usually made rear admirals of the Blue Squadron with their place in the squadron being determined by their seniority on the ‘post captains’ list. On each subsequent promotion round (or ‘promotion’) flag officers moved through the squadrons and ranks, rising to the crowning dignity of Admiral of the Red if they lived to benefit from a sufficient number of promotions. When there were large promotions, a few admirals began their flag careers as rear admirals of the White, and those in more senior positions went directly from the White Squadron to the next flag rank or from the Blue to Red squadrons in their current rank.
During the war years, flag officers moved relatively quickly through the ranks and squadrons because there were frequent and often sizeable promotions. There were two promotions in 1794 and one in each year of the wars except 1796, 1798, 1800, 1803, 1806 and 1815. Flag promotion was largely determined by seniority on the list of ‘post captains’, but a few officers were passed over because they had very serious stains on their records or, more commonly, failed to satisfy eligibility criteria specified in terms of the currency of active service in an appropriate command over a given period of time. For example, in the French Wars, the test was whether a post captain had commanded at sea in the ‘last’ (that is the American Revolutionary War) and was ‘free of stigma’. In the Napoleonic Wars the period of eligibility was dated to the recommencement of war in 1803 after the Peace of Amiens. The Board had the (pretty much discretionary) option of consigning (usually very old and/or unwell) post captains to the ranks of ‘superannuated rear admirals’; these officers enjoyed the title and half pay of a rear admiral but were removed from the active list and were not eligible for further promotion. The term ‘post captain’ applied to officers promoted to the substantive rank of captain as distinguished from those holding the rank of ‘commander’ (‘master and commander’ before 1794) who were referred to as ‘captain’ as a courtesy.
Secretary of State
Until 1801 governors of Newfoundland reported to the Secretary of State for the Home Department and thereafter to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. These roles were senior cabinet positions in the British government. The secretary of state responsible for Newfoundland was advised by the Privy Council ‘Committee of Council on Trade and Foreign Plantations’, sometimes referred to simply as ‘the Committee on Trade’. Wartime secretaries of state with responsibilities for Newfoundland were: Henry Dundas, later first Lord Melville (1791–4), Duke of Portland (1794–1801), Lord Hobart (1801–4), Earl Camden (1804–5), Viscount Castlereagh (1805–6), William Windham (1806–7), Viscount Castlereagh (1807–9), Earl of Liverpool (1809–12) and Earl Bathurst (1812–27).
ABBREVIATIONS
BL British Library (London, UK)
DAI Digital Archives Initiative, Centre for Newfoundland Studies, (St John’s, Newfoundland)
DCB Dictionary of Canadian Biography
NMM Carid Library, National Maritime Museum (Greenwich, UK)
NA National Archives (Kew, UK)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
PAN Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador (St John’s, Newfoundland)
MAP
This map shows the location of settlements on the east coast of Newfoundland. In the French Wars the most significant areas of settlement were (from the north): Twillingate and Fogo (Notre Dame Bay), Greenspond (Bonavista Bay), Trinity (Trinity Bay), Carbonear and Harbour Grace (Conception Bay), St John’s, Ferryland, Trepassey, St Mary’s, Placentia, Fortune. Source: Keith Mercer, Rough Justice: Policing, Crime, and the Origins of the Newfoundland Constabulary, 1729-1871 (St John’s: Flanker Press, 2021).
INTRODUCTION
From 1729 Newfoundland (and the ‘adjoining parts’ of Labrador and Anticosti between 1763 and 1774 and after 1809) was governed by a series of senior commissioned officers of the Royal Navy. From the sixteenth century the settlement had been the focus of an increasingly extensive trade based on the rich and apparently limitless stocks of cod fish off its coast and was defined in terms of that trade. Its governors, who also commanded the squadron based at St John’s, were charged with responsibility for an entity that was characterized as a ‘fishery’. In the early days, governors were post captains holding the temporary rank of commodore, but from the appointment of Rear Admiral Montague in 1776, a string of officers with the substantive flag ranks of rear, vice or full admiral filled the role.1 The combination of civil and military responsibilities was unusual, but so too was the entity these admirals governed. Vice Admiral the Honourable William Waldegrave, governor between 1797 and 1800, described the ‘Island of Newfoundland’ as ‘a sort of amphibious Government, totally unlike any other.’2 This government was a discrete and unique responsibility of senior flag officers, as distinctive in its way as their commands of fleets at sea, or at shore-based stations in Great Britain and Ireland.3
This book explores a series of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century admirals’ responses to the challenges arising from their dual roles as governors and commanders-in-chief at a time when Great Britain was involved in a protracted global struggle with revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Unlike an earlier study by Jerry Bannister which is concerned largely with naval governance as a system of rule and senior naval officers’ role in the Island’s evolving judiciary over the very long eighteenth century, the focus here is on flag officers’ responses to challenges arising in this uniquely ‘amphibious’ command at a critical period in its history.4 There are a number of reasons for focusing on the role of wartime naval governors. Although Newfoundland was not a major theatre of action on land or sea, the global scale of the French Wars meant that governors’ military responsibilities increased significantly, particularly from 1812 to 1814 when Britain was also at war with the United States of America.5 Despite the scale and duration of these responsibilities, the Island’s governors were far more active in addressing the civil needs of the population than those holding these roles in the Seven Years’ and American Revolutionary Wars.6 Their high level of engagement with the needs of civil society – education, the judiciary, measures of popular welfare and social control, and religious provision – reflected the naval governors’ appreciation that
The Naval Government of Newfoundland in the French Wars
the resident population of the Island was becoming increasingly numerous and demographically diverse as the settlement was transformed from a largely (but not exclusively) ‘migratory’ maritime work camp to what contemporaries termed a ‘sedentary’ fishery. It is significant, moreover, that their energetic and insightful responses to these challenges were influenced by a set of distinctive professional attitudes which were the hallmark of those who had successful careers in the senior ranks of the Royal Navy from the early 1790s. Finally, if the naval governors were not distracted by the war, their political masters in London certainly were. The financial and strategic demands of a prolonged series of staggeringly expensive global operations meant that, until the very end of the wars, governors of Newfoundland had to contend with the practical and political effects of senior ministers’ failure to recognize the significance of the changes that had taken place on the Island since the 1780s.7
The remainder of this introductory chapter will consider the local and imperial context of the naval government of Newfoundland and the distinctive features of the professional background from which the wartime governors came. It will conclude with a survey of late Georgian Newfoundland historiography relevant to this study.
Plate 0.1 This early (c. 1700) engraving shows the main stages in the industrial approach to fish processing developed to maximize the productivity of the cod fishery. (Courtesy Library of Congress LC-USZ62-32072.)
The Newfoundland context
Although British merchants were exporting timber, seal, salmon and whale oils and furs from Newfoundland in the late eighteenth century, cod remained the staple of the fishery. From the late spring until the early autumn huge quantities of cod caught in onshore waters or out on the Grand Banks were preserved through salting and drying and shipped to markets in the Mediterranean. Inferior fish were sent to West Indian colonies to feed slaves working on plantations. Unlike other staple economies in Britain’s Atlantic territories, Newfoundland was not primarily a source of commodities that were shipped to Britain to be consumed or processed there. Rather, the Island’s economic impact on the British economy tended to be indirect. The merchants who shipped fish to Europe were paid in bullion which was either repatriated to Great Britain or used to purchase luxury goods for sale in home markets or elsewhere.
Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, the fishery was largely reliant on a workforce that migrated annually to Newfoundland; it was thus a significant consumer of British and Irish labour. The Island was entirely dependent on the importation of provisions, consumer goods and supplies necessary to work the fishery and, after Britain’s loss of thirteen colonies on the North American mainland in 1783, most of these imports came from England and Ireland.8 Despite the role of cod fish as the staple of the Newfoundland economy, the Island was not merely the site of extractive activity. In the seventeenth century it had become the centre of a trading system which reached deep into the economies of the region and extended beyond the Atlantic seaboard to the Mediterranean.9 Even in a narrower Newfoundland context, the merchants’ purchase and exportation of the produce of the various fisheries was a moment in a more extensive trading cycle. By the late eighteenth century there had been a marked decline in merchants’ direct involvement in fishing, but they continued to provide provisions and supplies to those who ran fishing operations and purchased from them processed fish products for export.10 Fisheries products were the means through which the fishers repaid merchants for supplies that were advanced to them and were then utilized in their trade in European and other markets.11
While ministers in London were aware of the economic benefits of the fisheries, governments’ commitment to the Newfoundland fishery was invariably framed in terms of its role as a ‘nursery of seamen’ and thus as a key British strategic priority.12 In common with other significant early modern maritime powers, the British state faced ongoing challenges in training and maintaining a body of skilled seamen necessary to man the large fleets needed in wartime. Work on the fisheries, small boat handling in challenging conditions and service on vessels going from Britain to Newfoundland and from thence to the Mediterranean bred skilled, resilient seamen who were employed on British merchant vessels in peacetime and who would volunteer for, or be pressed into, wartime service in the Royal Navy.13 The perception of the value of the fishery as a nursery of seamen went back to late Tudor times and underwrote eighteenth-century attempts to ensure it remained ‘migratory’. To this end, experienced fishermen and novices, or ‘green
The Naval Government of Newfoundland in the French Wars
men’, who shipped as ‘passengers’ to Newfoundland in the spring, were required to return to Britain when the season ended in the autumn. Commitment to the idea of Newfoundland’s critical role in naval manning meant that the extractive and trading activities of the fishery were seen by the British government as instruments for funding and incentivized the development and retention of a well-trained maritime workforce. These assumptions underwrote British policy and were warmly endorsed by naval commanders who had first-hand experience of the challenge of finding prime seamen to man their ships. When war broke out, these men would be recruited in Britain and Ireland and taken from ships returning to home ports. Newfoundland itself also served as a fertile location for forced and voluntary recruitment into ships on the station and at one stage attracted the attention of the hard-pressed commander-in-chief of the North American squadron based at Halifax, Nova Scotia.14
The Royal Navy’s perspective on the value of the fishery was epitomized in the career of Sir Hugh Palliser, a distinguished Royal Navy captain (and later an admiral and MP) who was governor from 1762 to 1766. His highly active approach to the role was underwritten by a strong commitment to a traditional view of the fishery as a nursery of seamen and a belief that the unprincipled exploitation of
Plate 0.2 The experience gained on passages to and from Newfoundland and boat handling in the challenging waters surrounding the Island were central to the fishery’s primary official rationale as a ‘nursery of seamen’. (Detail from Joseph Jeakes, after John Thomas Serres, The Situation of His Majesty’s Packet The Lady Hobart (1804), courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection B1977.14.13041.)
the migratory labour force undermined the pursuit of this objective. Palliser had been shocked by the condition of fishermen forced by debt to winter over and was alarmed at the threat they posed to public order on the Island. His responses to these challenges to the ‘good of the fishery’ were reflected in the act passed in 1775 (15 Geo. III. Cap. 31) which is colloquially named after him. Its preamble highlighted the contribution that a properly managed fishery would make to the perennial problem of naval manning: experience ‘in Europe’ had shown that fisheries were ‘the best nurseries for able and experienced seamen, always ready to man the royal navy when occasions require’.15
Key clauses of the act were designed to advance this goal by regulating aspects of the employment relationship between ‘passengers’ brought out from Britain and Ireland as seasonal workers in the fisheries and those who transported and employed them. Thus the masters of British vessels were forbidden from landing passengers on continental America and those who employed them were required to withhold up to £2 from wages to pay their passage home at the end of the season. A limit was imposed on the proportion of wages that could be advanced in goods or cash to prevent fishermen from concluding their employment in a tangle of debt which prevented them returning home. A requirement that outstanding wages were the first charge on monies raised by the sale of fish and fish oil prevented the fishermen’s claims being subordinated to those of merchants and other commercial creditors. Finally, penalties for absence were specified in the act rather than being at the discretion of employers, and disputes arising from its provisions were to be determined in the Court of Sessions of Newfoundland.16 The act was thus framed in terms of the ‘nursery of seamen’ rationale of British control of Newfoundland and was premised on the assumption that it relied on a largely migratory workforce and fishery.
At the height of the migratory fishery in the late 1780s, fleets numbering close to 300 vessels sailed in convoys in the company of large numbers of supply ships. Earlier in the century, merchants from north Devon had played a major role in the trade but their dominance gave way to those based in ports on the southern coast of Devon and Dorset. It was common for merchants from these areas to form part of the spring migration, returning to their opulent English homes and extensive business premises in the autumn when the season ended. From about 1800, Irish and Scottish merchants based in St John’s became increasingly prominent in the fisheries trade and related commercial activities serving the needs of a growing residential workforce.17 West Country merchants continued, however, to play a significant direct role in another major settlement in Trinity Bay, a little further to the north.18 Trinity was one of a number of ‘outports’ that dotted the numerous bays that made up the coastline of the Island. The population of these areas varied greatly, ranging at the end of the period from over 9,000 permanent residents in Conception Bay to the north of St John’s and less than 1,200 in Fortune Bay on the southern coast of the Island.19 Regardless of the population of the outports, however, the lack of viable roads beyond St John’s meant that they were all reliant on the sea for their communications with other parts of the Island.
The structure and practice of eighteenth-century parliamentary politics meant that the most prominent of the English Newfoundland merchants acquired electoral influence in parliamentary boroughs which helped them safeguard their business interests. Several West Country boroughs had very restricted franchises, and here, as elsewhere in Britain, election outcomes were subject to elite influence, commercial pressure and outright bribery. Political ‘interest’ allowed prominent merchants to secure patronage appointments for their followers from the central government. Their wealth provided the means of accommodating members of the local elite by lavish civic hospitality and encouraging non-voters to give raucous support to favoured candidates and intimidate their rivals.20
The Poole Corporation was dominated by merchants with Newfoundland connections who were able to ensure that the body of electors (the ‘freemen’) was well stocked with members of their closely interlocking family and business interests. In every parliament between 1790 and 1834 at least one of the MPs for Poole was connected to the Newfoundland trade. Benjamin Lester, who ran a major operation at Trinity, was mayor of Poole, an MP for the borough and deputy lord lieutenant of the county. When operating in that interesting territory occupied by expert advisors and lobbyists, he was on a familiar footing with powerful political figures including the prime minister and the first lord of the admiralty.21 Robert Newman, whose family was prominent in the Dartmouthbased trade between Newfoundland and Portugal, was MP for Bletchingley from 1812 and 1818 and Exeter from 1818 to 1826.22 In Dartmouth itself, the Newmans and their friends were long-time allies of the Holdsworths, another local family with extensive interests in the Newfoundland trade. This connection dominated the political life of the borough, with one or other of its members holding the Dartmouth mayoralty seventy-six times between 1715 and 1830 and thus having a critical role in choosing the forty freemen who elected its two MPs.23 From 1802 to 1820 one of these seats was held by a Holdsworth, the other by a member of the Bastard family with whom the Holdsworths were closely associated.24
Political ‘interest’ mobilized on behalf of Newfoundland merchants gave a distinctive imperative edge to its ‘requests’ to naval governors to provide convoy protection for their ships and to ministers to attend to matters of concern to the trade.25 On occasion, ‘interest’ might be mobilized more directly to ward off unwelcome initiatives. Thus in May 1798 when it was rumoured that the Ministry was giving favourable consideration to Waldegrave’s suggestion of a tax on rum to fund education and church building in Newfoundland, associates of Benjamin Lester, father-in-law of one of the sitting members, hurried up to London to rally their parliamentary ‘friends’.26 Five years earlier a leading merchant from Dartmouth had attacked a mooted rum tax before a House of Commons Committee, declaring that ‘no Tax being necessary of this sort, unless it be for the purpose of supporting Luxury and Idleness’.27
When the British ministers were framing a government for the convict settlement at Botany Bay, a senior official suggested that Newfoundland might serve as a model.28 Although there were formal similarities between the governments of the two settlements, these did not extend to its practice. The early governors of New
South Wales were senior naval officers, and, like their colleagues in Newfoundland, governed through royal prerogative and were not constrained by a local assembly. Newfoundland interests were, however, part of a broader British political constituency which affected the way its governors’ powers were exercised. The naval governors of Newfoundland were acutely conscious of the parliamentary interest of some of their subjects and were close enough to London to feel the effect of it. By contrast, communications between London and New South Wales took up to two years, and those condemned to live there had no political interest at all.
Newfoundland was not a colony, and in the late Georgian period senior officials in London were determined to resist for as long as possible developments that would propel it towards that status. The issue had long been a matter of contention and from time to time proposals had been made to constitute the Island as a colony. This option had last been given serious official consideration during Lord Grenville’s administration in the mid-1760s.29 From 1775, however, the combined efforts of Charles Jenkinson (later Baron Hawkesbury and first Earl of Liverpool) at the Board of Trade and Sir Hugh Palliser resulted in the legislative enshrinement of provisions which assumed that the permanent settlement of Newfoundland and measures which treated it as an embryonic colony would compromise the flow of seamen back to Great Britain. As Lord Liverpool put it in early 1804, ‘it has been an established Maxim, that Newfoundland should never be considered merely as a Colony.’ While acknowledging that the increase in settled population meant that it had become ‘a sort of colony’, he nevertheless insisted that it was ‘proper . . . to constrain this Tendency as long as possible, at the same time Concessions must occasionally be made so as to prevent Tumult or Disorder among the People of this Island’.30 Patrick O’Flaherty observed that British policy makers were inclined to regard Newfoundland as an extension of that country’s ‘commercial and military strength’ rather than as a distinct social and political entity. This attitude mirrored that of non-resident West Country merchants who, as Jerry Bannister puts it, saw Newfoundland as ‘English backcountry’.31
Despite measures such as Palliser’s Act and the attitude expressed in Liverpool’s declaration, a range of economic and strategic developments were eroding the viability of the model of a migratory fishery promoted by them. The prolonged wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France provided fresh momentum to shifts in the demographics of the Island and the economics of the fisheries which predated them by several decades. A resident population of less than 12,000 at the beginning of the French Revolutionary War had grown to nearly 28,000 in the second decade of the nineteenth century.32 Some of this growth was a result of extensive emigration from Ireland in the final years of the war, but it was underpinned by natural increases produced by a more balanced demographic than that found in a maritime work camp. Gordon Hancock notes that while Newfoundland continued to resemble the Klondike until well into the nineteenth century, the significant increase in resident females from the turn of the century provided the basis for a residential fishery and for later changes in the social atmosphere and character of the settlement.33
As the resident population of the Island increased, wartime conditions reduced the inflow of migratory fishery workers from the UK. The demand for seamen
for the Royal Navy decimated the labour force available to ship to Newfoundland every spring, and wartime conditions added to the natural hazards of the Atlantic crossing and fishing off the Grand Banks. Increasingly, the convoys that made the western journey in the spring were dominated by supply ships protected by menof-war of the squadron destined for St John’s. Before the wars, Catholic countries in southern Europe were the main markets for Newfoundland fish, but as they entered into alliances with French governments or fell under their control, they were closed to British merchandise. As a result, the demand for fish, and the prices paid for it relative to the cost of supplies, contracted sharply. Shipments to slave colonies in the West Indies provided some relief, but even if large numbers of British seamen had been available for employment in the Newfoundland fishery, they would have been surplus to requirements because for most of the war years the growing resident labour force was sufficient to meet the reduced demand.34 By 1805, 90 per cent of salt cod was produced by residents, and the relatively small number of ‘passengers’ working in the fishery were employed by them rather than, as had been the case in the past, by non-resident employers.35 When the demand for fish strengthened temporarily in the closing years of the Napoleonic War, the labour force was augmented by an influx of poor migrants from rural Ireland.
The growth of the sedentary fishery expanded the scale of the government of Newfoundland and helped shift the locus of economic power on the Island. The increasing scale of government was reflected in estimates approved by the British Parliament for the civil establishment. In 1789 when Vice Admiral Mark Milbanke was governor the estimates were just over £1,000. By 1813 they had increased to £4,000 and were over £5,000 in 1815.36 The increasing reliance on a sedentary labour force in the fisheries was matched by changes to the merchant elite of the Island. Although Newfoundland retained its role as a British trading asset and people connected to its trade continued to sit in the House of Commons, the rise of a residential merchant elite had important implications for the government of the Island as governors faced organized attempts by the local Society of Merchants to oversee their activities.37 Members of the Society, and the less clearly defined groups who styled themselves ‘the principal inhabitants of St John’s’, resisted attempts to raise taxes on the Island and were resentful when governors developed revenue streams from rents and leases and sought permission from the secretary of state to apply funds from these sources to support their initiatives. As we shall see, these matters provoked criticism of naval government by pro-colonial interests in St John’s towards the end of the wars.38 Throughout the period, however, naval governors who managed their relationships with the local elite skilfully were able to advance mutually valued civic causes.
The naval context: Flag officers as governors
The formal establishment of civil government in the hands of the senior naval officer at St John’s dated from 1729 but was foreshadowed in an Order in Council of 1708 which responded to a representation from the Board of Trade and Plantations. The
Board in turn was reacting to complaints from the Island that naval and military officers were abusing their power for personal gain and were (contrary to law) engaging in the fisheries and levying ‘exactions’ on other, legal, participants. The Board did not think naval officers were engaging in these activities but believed the charges were well founded in the case of the commander of the garrison at St John’s.39
Even without these difficulties, however, there were concerns about the operation of the Island’s rudimentary justice system and the role played in it by the ‘fishing admirals’. These men were not commissioned naval officers, and their mode of appointment was as idiosyncratic as their title. No consideration was given to character or judgement, let alone legal knowledge or judicial experience. The role was assigned to the captain of the first ship to arrive off a part of the coast in a given season.40 The Order in Council of 1708 specified that the senior commissioned naval officer at St John’s should in future ‘have the command at land’ as well as at sea. They were to uphold the statutes applying to Newfoundland and provide a check on what Chief Justice Reeves later termed ‘the ignorance and partiality of the fishing admirals’.41 It was also expected that the commodores would oversee the management of government stores on the Island and the consolidation and submission of returns on the fishery.
These measures were not effective, and in the years that followed there were ongoing difficulties in administering basic justice among those on the Island, persistent dissatisfaction with the conduct of the fishing admirals and clashes between the commodores and senior army officers in the garrison at Placentia, a settlement on the south-west coast of the Avalon Peninsula.42 When Placentia was ceded to the British under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1715, control of its garrison was assigned to the military commander of Nova Scotia. This arrangement emboldened local army officers to continue to flout the law and challenge the authority of the naval commander. Jerry Bannister has characterized the period before 1729 as being ‘close to anarchy’.43
The Orders-in-Council of 1729 sought to address these difficulties. They confirmed the supremacy of the naval commanders-in-chief by specifying that they were to exercise the full powers and responsibilities of civil governors of the Island and be issued with an appropriate royal commission on appointment. Naval commanders’ formal responsibility for upholding the laws regulating the fishery (stat. 10 & 11 William 3) was to be incorporated in their Instructions. Their government included Placentia which thus ceased to be part of Nova Scotia. In addition to their responsibilities as commander-in-chief, naval governors were to oversee the civil government of the Island (such as it was), preside over the system of justice and arrange for those accused of serious crimes to be shipped to England for trial. These measures had the effect of reining in the military –curbing its ‘worst excesses and abuses’ – and thus ensuring that it did not become the disruptive and corrupt presence which marred the early history of New South Wales. They also laid the basis for a century-long series of developments in the administration of justice on the Island.44
While the naval government of Newfoundland thus arose out of a series of crises, it built on aspects of past practice and might be seen as a tidy solution to problems facing the settlement. The recent conduct of senior military officers in
