Fish into Wine Fish the newfoundland plantation in the seventeenth century peter e. pope Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London into Wine The Omohundro © 2004 The University of North Carolina Press Institute of Early All rights reserved Set in Monticello type American History by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America and Culture is sponsored jointly Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data by the College of Pope, Peter Edward, 1946– Fish into wine : the Newfoundland plantation in the William and Mary seventeenth century / Peter E. Pope. p. cm. and the Colonial Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8078-2910-2 (alk. paper) — Williamsburg isbn 0-8078-5576-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Newfoundland and Labrador—Social life and customs— Foundation. On 17th century. 2. Newfoundland and Labrador—Economic conditions—17th century. 3. Plantation life—Newfoundland November 15, 1996, and Labrador—History—17th century. 4. Frontier and the Institute adopted pioneer life—Newfoundland and Labrador. 5. English— Newfoundland and Labrador—History—17th century. the present name in 6. Cod fisheries—Newfoundland and Labrador—History— 17th century. 7. Land settlement—Newfoundland and honor of a bequest Labrador—History—17th century. 8. Newfoundland and Labrador—Emigration and immigration—History—17th from Malvern H. century. 9. England—Emigration and immigration— History—17th century. I. Omohundro Institute of Early Omohundro, Jr. American History & Culture. II. Title. f1123.p66 2004 971.8'01—dc22 2004002521 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. This volume received indirect support from an unrestricted book publication grant awarded to the Institute by the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation of Oakland, California. cloth 08 07 06 05 04 54321 paper 08 07 06 05 04 54321 preface It is tempting to write several forewords. American readers certainly de- serve one to whet their demonstrated appetite for alternative colonial his- tories: a meal of northern cod to complement the banquet already set by researchers over the last few decades along the eastern seaboard and beyond. The prudent Newfoundlander will write a more diffident fore- word for Canadians, reminding them (again) that the history of northern settlement before the British conquest of 1763 is more than the history of New France. That claim will resonate more clearly in Acadia or Quebec than in Upper Canada, for Newfoundland’s past is intricately intercon- nected with the history of its neighbors, whereas central Canadians have an impressive capacity to acknowledge the existence of Atlantic Canada without paying it much sustained attention. In mythic terms, Canada for them is the result of a historic engagement between Britain and France in the mid-eighteenth century, and the existence of earlier English settle- ments on the Atlantic fringe often seems no more than an inconsistent detail. The colorful story of the Newfoundland fishery will be familiar to British readers, or at least to those with an interest in the West Country or Ireland. Given that a presumed conflict of economic interests between fisher and settler remains the default assumption when English histo- rians turn to the subject of early Newfoundland, they are likely to take the present volume as a piece of revisionism. Newfoundlanders them- selves may well read it as a parti pris in a continuing debate over our foundation myth: the supposed illegality of settlement. This is a key fea- ture of our traditional historiography, popularized a century ago by the accomplished regional historian Judge Prowse, in which powerful West Country commercial interests supposedly impeded settlement. This my- thology remains influential, although scholars have begun to agree that paper regulation has been overinterpreted as a practical attempt to elimi- nate settlement. European readers and others familiar with the long and complex history of the Breton, Norman, and Basque transatlantic fish- eries will know how much is left as background in this study in order to 1 focus attention on one aspect of North Atlantic history. In the end, I can 1. For alternative colonial histories, see Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, Mass., 2003); and Margaret R. Conrad and James K. Hiller, Atlantic Canada: A Region in the Making (Don Mills, Ont., 2001). For a tra- only hope that readers, whatever their point of view, will find the story as interesting as I do. h The origins of this book lie almost twenty years ago, in my frustra- tion as a student of historical archaeology, when I went to the library to find a social history of the English settlements of seventeenth-century Newfoundland. Not that I came back empty-handed. Gillian Cell’s book, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577–1660, and C. Grant Head’s geographer’s perspective in Eighteenth Century Newfoundland turned out to be invaluable guides to the periods before and after the one I was trying to understand, roughly 1630–1700. The late Keith Matthew’s seminal ‘‘Fence-building’’ essay helped make sense of the existing sec- ondary literature, which seemed curiously selective in its attention to the documentary record. The prejudices of some contemporary visitors to seventeenth-century Newfoundland had prevented them from recog- nizing in its tiny fishing hamlets a level of social organization that they could accept as a civil society. An eighteenth-century perception that migratory fishers and settlers were inevitably in conflict over the issue of local government evolved into the nineteenth-century idea that they were actually in conflict over settlement itself. Reinforced by the my- thology of illegal settlement, this theory of ‘‘retarded development’’ mis- led many twentieth-century historians into the unsupportable assump- tion that there was no continuous European presence worth speaking of in seventeenth-century Newfoundland. Given how pervasive this point of view was only a few years ago, that no one thought it worth try- ing to parse the socioeconomic structure of early settlement is hardly 2 surprising. This book, then, is an attempt to record the way of life that developed between three and four centuries ago in the part of North America first exploited by Europeans. Although Newfoundland and its fishery were once of great importance to Europe, the colonies that developed here were small and of less importance economically and politically than the ditional view, see Prowse, History. On paper regulation versus practice, see Keith Matthews, ‘‘Historical Fence Building: A Critique of the Historiography of New- foundland,’’ Newfoundland Studies, XVII (2001), 143–165; and Jerry Bannister, ‘‘Whigs and Nationalists: The Legacy of Judge Prowse’s History of Newfound- land,’’ Acadiensis, XXXII, no. 1 (2002), 84–109. 2. Cell, English Enterprise; Head, Newfoundland; Matthews, ‘‘Historical Fence Building,’’ Newfoundland Studies, XVII (2001), 143–165. vi ] Preface industry they served. They are, though, an instructive case, as an ex- ample of how capitalism scattered Europeans across the Atlantic. These colonies came to play an important cultural role in the fishery, and an- other aim of this book is to explain how Newfoundland settlement served this industry in what seems to me a peculiarly modern way. This was a cash or at least a credit economy in which the accidents of geography limited the possibilities for agricultural self-sufficiency, while the riches of the fishery encouraged ordinary folk to earn and spend. In their pre- cocious consumerism, fishers and their hosts in Newfoundland were ex- perimenting with a new kind of economy. h In the interests of elucidating this burgeoning economic activity, I sometimes offer approximate present-day U.S. dollar equivalents for seventeenth-century monetary figures. This practice, which will offend many historians, who are strongly convinced that such estimates are mis- leading, is worth some discussion—the more so, if it will also serve to introduce one of the central themes of the book, the early development of a modern consumer economy. Although it may be true that the cal- culation of monetary equivalents across centuries is misleading to some degree, it may be even more misleading to let early modern monetary values stand without some attempt at translation into modern figures. The difficult question thus arises of how to compare the value of curren- cies over time. Since we have prices for certain key goods, notably bread and beer, over many centuries, this is not, on the face of it, an insuperable technical problem. Interpretative issues certainly lurk here, but they are not peculiar to the attempt to compare two economies historically. The central problem that arises in any attempt to define a rate of ex- change between any two separate economies is that it is meaningful to compare prices only for goods available in the markets of both economies. If either twenty dollars in U.S. dollars or thirty dollars Canadian will buy a barrel of oil, the Canadian dollar will be worth something like sixty- seven cents U.S. The determination of historical exchange rates over cen- turies is not, however, very much like comparing U.S. and Canadian cur- rencies, which are used in similar markets by populations with similar consumption habits, choosing from similar baskets of goods. The central problem raised by historical exchange rates is much more like the prob- lem of expressing monetary equivalents between an advanced Western economy, whether Britain, the United States, or Canada, and a smaller developing economy like Thailand or even an underdeveloped economy like Zambia. The official exchange rate determined by international mar- Preface [ vii kets in such cases partakes of the same arbitrariness that can justly be decried in the attempt to define historical exchange rates.