Barr'd Islands: From English Roots

By Eric R. Witcher

Barr’d Islands: From English Roots is a history of early English settlement in Notre Dame Bay, Newfoundland, with a focus on Barr’d Islands, a small fishing community on Fogo Island.

Explore the day-to-day lives of a charitable, community-minded people whose hardships were many in a time when survival from year to year was uncertain: living under the iron fist of merchant firms, subsistence farming, poverty. Also, learn of these early settlers’ faith, richness of virtue, hard-work ethic, and games and amusements shared by all in the community.

Finally, this book is a genealogical treasure trove that traces many well-known Newfoundland family trees back to their English roots in the 1600s.
The mission of this Historic series is to bring to light the ageless character of Newfoundland and Labrador communities in an effort to preserve the history of this province and to educate future generations about this corner of the global village.

Barr’d Islands: From English Roots is the first instalment in this series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: Jul 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781926881102

Eric R. Witcher

Eric R. Witcher was born in Barr’d Islands in 1946. After graduating from high school there, he attended university, receiving a B.A. (Ed.) and a B.A. from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and a M.A. from California State University. He became a schoolteacher, spending most of his career in Lewisporte. Eric is married to Ruth Vaters of Victoria, Carbonear. They have one child, Rosetta, who is married to Brian Lubbers of Calgary, where they reside.

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century.

~ 1 ~

The Beginning

. . . and made the moody sea their second home,

Though lives it claimed and buried many dead,

But on its turbulent bosom they must roam,

That their wives and children may have bread.

Otto Kelland, Our Forefathers¹

In the immediate years following John Cabot’s rediscovery of Newfoundland in 1497 (Aboriginal people and the Vikings had discovered the island hundreds of years before), it became well known in Europe that codfish were plentiful in the waters surrounding Newfoundland. By 1550, four European countries— England, France, Spain, and Portugal—were sending ships to Newfoundland to be involved in the fishery.² Sailors from these countries had visited Fogo Island, Newfoundland, in the years of exploration before the migratory fishery began and had become familiar with the waters around that island.

A 1529 map, on which Fogo Island is labelled Terra del Fuego, provides evidence that Portuguese fishermen visited the island in the early 1500s.³ Some writers claim that the Frenchman Jacques Cartier sailed to Fogo Island in 1534, and that the island appeared on a French map of that year.⁴ England, however, eventually gained control of Newfoundland in wars fought in European waters, and it was England that predominately pursued the fishery at Fogo Island, which lay near some of the richest fishing grounds in the world.

In 1602, Fogo Island was shown on an English map, and by the late 1600s a fishery was being carried on in Fogo by the English. As they had a successful fishery off the coast of Iceland for their own population, their involvement in the Newfoundland fishery was for making profit off the Spanish and Portuguese. By 1600 it was reported that, because of shortage of fish and meat, starvation of large numbers of people would have occurred in Spain and Portugal if it had not been for the cod caught in Newfoundland waters. The British government encouraged this fishery for another important reason: It provided a training ground for men who could be persuaded to join the British Navy.⁵

By the end of the 1600s a Fogo Island fishery was well established. Pere Baudoin in his journal of 1697 reported that in Fogo, Twillingate, and other scattered population in the northern part of the island, there were 150 men, 30 fishing establishments, 15 boats, and 4,000 quintals of fish caught.⁶

It is realistic to assume that a fishery off the coast of Barr’d Islands, a place on Fogo Island, was included in the other scattered population in the northern part and that Barr’d Islands was included in these statistics.

The first type of fishery pursued on Barr’d Islands’ excellent fishing grounds was a migratory fishery. During the 1600s and 1700s English merchant ships transported fishing crews from the southwest of England to Barr’d Islands. These men, hired by the merchants who owned the vessels (the owners usually claimed two-thirds of the profits and divided one-third among the servants), established fishing rooms, stages, stores, flakes, wharves, and shacks in both Little Harbour and Big Harbour. The ships arrived in May or June, had their rigging taken down, and were anchored in the harbours. The small boats (at the beginning brought from England, but in later years built by men who stayed during the winter) were launched for use in the fishery. Each day a crew of three to five men and boys rowed these boats to the fishing grounds off Barr’d Islands and fished all summer using hook and line with herring, capelin, and squid for bait. In the fall the ships and crews migrated back to England with their catch, which had been salted and dried on their fishing rooms. Because of disputes over property ownership and fear of property destruction in winter and by early arrivers in spring, the owners hired men to stay behind in Barr’d Islands to guard the property. After living in rough shacks for the number of summers and winters they had agreed on, they went back to their families in England.

During the 1700s, a second type of fishery emerged: the bye-boat fishery. Fishermen, after becoming skilled in the fishery during their employment with a merchant ship, travelled to Barr’d Islands on that ship, paid their fare, and then separated from the ship. During the summer, they, with the help of servants, carried on a fishery independent of the ship. They fished in small boats called bye-boats, and salted and dried their fish on their own fishing rooms. In the fall they sold their fish to the merchant ship or a sack ship. (Sack ships brought supplies in the spring and bought fish in the fall to take to the markets in Europe. There were four sack ships in the Fogo Island area in 1738, and in 1803 there were four with twenty-two people on board.) After selling their catch, the bye-boat fishermen pulled up their boats, left a keeper to look after their property, and boarded the merchant ship for England. By 1738 there were 135 bye-boat fishermen in the Fogo Island area, but by 1805, this type of fishery had died out.⁷

Out of the migratory and the bye-boat fisheries came a resident population at Barr’d Islands. Many servants who worked with these fisheries eventually chose to become planters: permanent settlers. By their repeated voyages and their overwintering, they had learned survival skills for living in Barr’d Islands. Although it is difficult to ascertain the exact year the first families made Barr’d Islands their permanent home, there is conclusive evidence that there were permanent settlers by the mid-1700s. D. W. Prowse in his History of Newfoundland states:

Subsequent to the French attack of 1696-97, from about 1700, the English settlements were gradually extended north from Bonavista; some of the first liviers, in old Newfoundland parlance, had by Twillingate, Exploits, and Fogo. . . . The English settlements north of Bonavista grew so rapidly that in 1732 the commodore was instructed to include in his scheme an account of Fogo . . . but none appears to have been furnished until that of Captain Vanbrugh in 1738. The most important particulars, then were: at Fogo, there were seven fishing boats, four Sack ships, seventy passengers, fourteen boats of fishing ships, twenty-five boats of inhabitants, one hundred thirty-five bye-boat men, nineteen thousand qtls. of fish, seal oil valued at seven hundred seventy pounds, furs valued at three-hundred pounds, twenty-one families, no farmers, two hundred and fifteen inhabitants, one hundred and forty-three people remained last winter.⁸

It is not known whether Vanburgh used the word Fogo to refer to the settlements of Fogo, or to refer to the entire area, including Barr’d Islands. (It was and still is common to refer to Fogo Island as Fogo.) If the Fogo area is being described by Vanburgh with such statistics as twenty-one families, no farmers, two hundred and fifteen inhabitants, one hundred and forty-three people remained last winter, it could very well mean that a few families were permanent settlers in Barr’d Islands by 1738. (Judging by these statistics, the families on Fogo Island in 1738 were quite well off.)

A permanent community was well established by the 1750s by the Cull family and perhaps others who later moved elsewhere. A resident fishery was in place. In a few years young men who married into the Cull family increased the number of families there. In 1803, Barr’d Islands was included in Slade’s statistics for Fogo Island. (It is incorrect, however, to assume that all residents of Barr’d Islands in the second half of the 1700s dealt with the Slades. Statistics gathered from Slades’ ledgers include only their clients, not those of other merchants and agents such as the Lesters of Tilting and Coghlan of Fogo.) The Fogo merchant, John Slade and Co.’s ledgers report in 1803 for Barr’d Islands, Fogo, Joe Batt’s Arm, and Tilting:

People that remained all winter:

80 masters, 75 men servants, 65 mistresses (wives and widows of settlers) 70 women servants (unmarried girls), 140 children, 150 Roman Catholics, and 300 Protestants.⁹

The 1816 population figures given for Barr’d Islands were ninety people. A new way of life dependent upon the cod fishery had taken shape.

Descriptions of life in Southwest England that the early settlers had experienced before coming to Barr’d Islands were passed down through several generations. Stories were told of unemployment, poor working conditions and low wages for those who were lucky enough to get work on the farms, dependency on England’s Poor Laws, and the discontent caused by these problems. (The first census taken in England, against strong opposition from certain sectors of society, was done in 1801. This census revealed that one-eighth of the population were paupers with families living on merely £10 income per year. In 1818 nearly £9 million was spent on the Poor Laws, money raised from taxes paid by the occupiers of property. To embarrass people from depending on charity, some parishes published lists of recipients of poor relief).¹⁰ People told how the economic problems in the second half of the 1700s and the early decades of the 1800s led to mob violence, property destruction, and deaths in some parts of England, and they told how these events gripped people with fear as the government retaliated with hanging radical leaders and transporting overseas other people involved. Criticisms were levelled by the early settlers of Barr’d Islands at the class-structured society in England in which social status depended on one’s inheritance or income. (Even churches were influenced, and appointed seats in order of rank with the peerage—dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, and barons—occupying cushioned seats at the front, while the poor were allocated seats in the lower part of the church.)

Descriptions were also given of the many positive aspects of English life that had to be left behind to find a means of making a living in England’s overseas territories: the many public services available in the towns and cities, the highly organized social activities such as annual country fairs, and the shared sense of belonging in the close community and family life. The mild climate, the beautiful countryside of Southwest England, and loving relatives there were greatly missed and longed for deeply. The emotional impact on families in England that were separated from members gone to sea is aptly expressed in Village Lad, an old song said to have been brought from England and passed down through generations of Barr’d Islanders:

A village lad, he left his home,

His mother there in tears.

She longed to see her boy again,

She had not seen for years.

She longed to see her boy again,

Who went sailing o’er the sea.

Her only true born English son,

Who had fought for liberty.

Just as the bells were ringing,

It was on one Sunday morn,

That he knocked at the door,

Of the cot where he was born.

His heart was almost broken,

When a neighbour to him said,

"She’s sleeping over yonder

My boy, your mother’s dead."

His dark blue eyes grew paler

And upwards they did stray,

Into the village churchyard,

Where his fond mother lay.

Kneeling down he kissed the ground

And like a child he cried.

He whispered softly saying,

I’ll be sleeping by your side.

As time passed, details both negative and positive of life in the old country faded. By the second half of the 1800s, very few people who lived in Barr’d Islands had grown up in England. The 1857 census returns record only fourteen people out of 208 had been born in England. Only three of these were alive when the 1874 census was taken. Close ties with England have long been severed, but English roots are evident in all aspects of the culture that was formed throughout the years in Barr’d Islands.

---

1 Otto Kelland, Bow Wave (St. John’s: Dicks and Co. Ltd., 1988), p. 5.

2 Keith Matthews, Edwin R. Kearley, and Paul J. Dwyer, Our Newfoundland and Labrador Cultural Heritage (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1982), p. 60.

3 Patrick Pickett, A History: Town of Fogo, Newfoundland (Grand Falls-Windsor: Robinson Blackmore, 1997), p. 6.

4 Ibid.

5 Matthews et al., p. 60.

6 D. W. Prowse, A History of Newfoundland (Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s: Boulder Publications, 2002), p. 698.

7 Prowse, p. 280.

8 Prowse, p. 277, 279-280.

9 Prowse, pp. 270-280.

10 Norman McCord, British History 1815-1906 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 44, 75.

~ 2 ~

Why They Came

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;

There gloom the dark, broad sea.

My mariners, souls that have toiled,

And wrought and thought with me . . .

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses¹

The first people to fish off the shores of Barr’d Islands and to establish fishing rooms in Little Harbour and Big Harbour came predominantly from Devonshire, Dorsetshire, and Hampshire, counties of southwest England. The merchants and sailors of that part of England had acquired much knowledge of the cod fishery. Some men, such as those from the Keats and Randell families, had a long history of maritime activities,² and had learned about the Newfoundland fishery. Dartmouth, Devonshire, was quite active in the Newfoundland trade during the 1600s and early 1700s, but by the mid-1700s, the number of ships from there declined. As a result, Poole, a port in Dorsetshire, emerged as the main centre for transporting people to the Newfoundland fishery. During the second half of the 1700s, Poole monopolized the Fogo Island fishery, so young men coming to the area came on Poole vessels.

Merchants of Poole recruited people for the Fogo Island fishery from January to May. The Lesters and Coghlan were the first merchants in the mid-1700s to hire servants for the Fogo Island fishery and to establish trading centres on the island. The Slades followed. John Slade and Co. started sending ships to Fogo Island in the 1760s and by 1770 had fifteen to twenty ships, between 30 and 120 tons involved in the Fogo-Twillingate fishery.³ The Slades sent men throughout Dorsetshire and Hampshire to recruit servants for the fishery. W. Gordon Handcock in his book Soe longe as there comes noe women states that Slades established recruitment centres in towns throughout the area:

37 centres in Sturminister, Newton, Dorset

11 in Wareham, Dorset

13 in Ringwood, Hampshire

8 in Christchurch, Hampshire⁴

Sometimes a grocery store became a centre for signing up. A Christopher Cobb, for example, of Ringwood signed up men for Lesters in his grocery and drugstore.⁵ Since these towns were recruitment centres, most of the people who settled Barr’d Islands came from those towns and others nearby such as Wimbourne Minister, Corfe Mullen, Dorchester, and Bridport. People bound for the Fogo Island fishery came into Poole from bordering counties such as Devonshire, Somerset, and Wiltshire. Before ships from Poole crossed the Atlantic, they stopped for supplies at southwest Ireland, where Irish servants boarded to work in the Fogo-Twillingate fishery. The marriage records of the Anglican parish of Fogo Island indicate the origins of some early settlers of Barr’d Islands:

Christopher Cobb – Dorsetshire

Randells – Bridport, Dorsetshire

Richard Reid – West Milton, Dorsetshire

James Rolls – Sturminister, Newton, Dorsetshire

Charles Keats (Shagg Rocks) – Dorchester, Dorsetshire

There were varied personal reasons why people became servants for the merchants Lesters, Coghlan, and Slades. The majority of young men that worked in the fishery came to Barr’d Island before they were in their mid-twenties. Although individual families may have views as to why their ancestors came to Barr’d Islands, most of these are based on tradition rather than fact. It is futile to speculate, after 200 years, why a particular person joined the fishery. A study of the church parish records of southwest England and the port records of Poole would, perhaps, cast some light on an individual’s reasoning for being employed in the Barr’d Islands fishery. Much information on this side of the Atlantic has been lost, and in some cases replaced by legend: criminal, stowaway, family disagreements, and ship jumper.

Some general observations have been made by such scholars as Keith Matthews and W. Gordon Handcock about the general conditions in England during the 1700s and the early 1800s and factors that influenced people to work in the fishery.⁶

1. A growth of population occurred in England during the 1700s, so there were more people than jobs.

2. The farmers in Dorset and Hampshire hired mostly women and children, perhaps because they paid them a lower wage. This lessened young men’s chance of employment.

3. The parish charities offered their poor to the merchants. Orphaned boys, sometimes as young as nine years old, were given a little money, clothing, and a sea chest, and were then apprenticed to a ship’s captain to learn the fishery. These boys, however, made up just a small percentage of the total number of people hired.

4. Parents of poor families sometimes offered their teenage boys to captains who were involved in the Newfoundland fishery, as there was no work available for them in England.

5. There were those, undoubtedly, who came on the fishing vessels for romantic reasons—naively seeking their fortune or seeking the great adventure.

6. A few people, perhaps, joined the fishery to escape a run-in with the law or to escape an unhappy home life or courtship.

The servants in the migratory fishery in Barr’d Islands, who came to earn money during the summer to augment the little earned during the winter in England, eventually became competent in all aspects of the fishery—on the fishing grounds, in the fish stages, and on the fish flakes. Each year some of these servants overwintered to guard their employers’ property in Barr’d Islands from vandalism and thievery and to prepare for the next fishing season so that when the fishing vessels returned in spring the captain and crew could proceed with the fishery as soon as possible. The fishery could only be carried on two or three months before the ships returned to England to avoid the fall gales and the storms on the North Atlantic. Depending on the contract that an individual signed with a ship’s captain, a person could be in Barr’d Islands several years before he went back to England. If he decided to settle permanently rather than return to England, he was well informed, after spending a few years in Barr’d Islands, of what was involved in creating a new life there. He had experienced life on a barren, rocky terrain that bordered on the harsh Atlantic (compared with the rolling farmlands of his home country). He had, during the long cold winters (contrasted with mild winters in southwest England), endured complete isolation from the rest of the world. He had been introduced to life without the cultural benefits of such institutions as school and church. He had become aware of the problems associated with the absence of medical facilities. He had gained extensive knowledge of the hard labour associated with the unpredictable cod fishery. Despite these and other glaring differences from his life in England, he decided to be a pioneer in Barr’d Islands.

John Lowell in his Gazetteer of 1881 said: "Barr’d Islands derives its name from having one or more narrow necks of land forming the harbour where the sea flows in very stormy weather."

---

1 M. A. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1974), p. 1,024.

2 W. Gordon Handcock, Soe longe as there comes noe women: Origins of English Settlement in Newfoundland (Milton: Global Heritage Press, 2003), p. 250.

3 Handcock, p. 236.

4 Handcock, p. 192.

5 Handcock, p. 187.

6 Keith Matthews, in Lectures on The History of Newfoundland: 1500-1830 (St. John’s, NL: Breakwater Books, c. 1988), and Handcock, in Soe longe as there comes noe women, scholars in Newfoundland history, have identified general reasons why people became involved in the Newfoundland fishery.

~ 3 ~

Why They Stayed

Each in his own way

They just came. That’s all . . .

Said good-bye to homely paths

Left behind the native sod

Tom Moore, Ancestors¹

During the 1700s and the early 1800s a number of people familiar with Barr’d Islands became planters, permanent settlers planted in a new land, despite the anti-settlement laws of the British government. They were men who had saved money while working in the migratory fishery, acquired or established a fishing room, built their own boats, and hired servants to help them with the fishery. These planters had become knowledgeable about the fishery as servants with the Lesters, Coghlan, and Slades, and as time passed, many of their servants became planters. The planters hired servants only until their male children could participate in the fishery.

Governor Hamilton in a letter to Viscount Melville at the British Admiralty gave in 1820 a description of the Newfoundland planters:

. . . Almost every fifth fisherman is what is termed a planter, particularly in the outports of the island. This means a man who has a boat of his own, which he employs during the fishing season to catch fish for himself. These he cures on his own flakes and when dry and fit for market, he carries them to the merchant in lieu of the supplies furnished his family thro’ the year. The boat is usually manned with 4 men, at the rate (at this period) of about 10 to 15 or even 20 pounds each for the season, 5 months, and found in provisions.²

Several factors influenced both male and female servants to abandon the migratory fishery, sever ties with England, and settle permanently in Barr’d Islands and other areas of Newfoundland. Matthews and Handcock have identified these factors:³

1. Some had gained greater competence in the fishery than any other trade. Many knew no other trade.

2. Continual voyages across the Atlantic took a heavy toll because of the hazards of fog, ice, and storms.

3. Fishing vessels were often in danger of being caught up in wars and of being captured by enemy warships.

4. Pirates roamed the seas seeking ships to pillage.

5. The press gang was quite active. They waited on the docks in England to press (force) into the Royal Navy men boarding the ships in spring and getting off in the fall.

6. If servants married on this side of the Atlantic, there was no housing available for many of them back in England. There was free land in Newfoundland, and plenty of building materials.

7. If they were hired as servants with bye-boat fishermen, hit a poor season and didn’t make enough money to pay their fare back to England on the merchant ship, they were forced to stay.

As more people became planters, it became apparent that the migratory fishery would die, and jobs lost. Those involved in the migratory fishery were eventually forced to make a decision to settle in Newfoundland or seek work in another industry in England. As harsh as pioneer life in Barr’d Islands must have been, it apparently outweighed the existence the planters who settled there had back in England. People exchanged the Vale of Blackmoor for the rocky terrain of Barr’d Islands. Perhaps they felt like Edward Hayes, captain of the Golden Hind, in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s convoy, who wrote in the 1580s encouraging settlement in Newfoundland: It is very miserably to live and die in a country pestered with inhabitants.⁴

Once life with England was severed, planters had to acquire property in Barr’d Islands. Some came into possession of fishing rooms that had been used in the migratory fishery. Others established new fishing rooms, taking preferred areas. Inheritance, intermarriage, and purchase were factors that influenced the quality and the location of the acquired fishing room. Latecomers received less desirable fishing rooms exposed to rough seas.

It is possible to piece together a fairly accurate account of both the early and later planters of Barr’d Islands from the following sources, though they are incomplete and subject to human error:

1. The Slade merchant records beginning in 1783.⁵

2. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s records kept by missionaries from 1816 to 1823.

3. Church of England Fogo parish records, beginning in 1841.

4. Methodist/United Church Fogo charge records, beginning in 1862.

5. The 1836 census taken by John Peyton of Twillingate.⁶

6. Lovell’s directory of 1871 (available at Public Library).

7. McAlpine’s directories of 1894 and 1898 (Memorial University).

8. Government censuses (Memorial University).

9. Cemetery inscriptions throughout Notre Dame Bay.⁷

10. Seary’s book Family Names of the Island of Newfoundland.

11. Personal information gathered during the past forty years.

From this information, the people who settled in Barr’d Islands can be divided into three groups:

1. The original planters.

2. Servants in the migratory fishery who became planters after the original planters.

3. People who came later because of intermarriage or adoption.

These groups formed a culture in Barr’d Islands centred around the cod fishery. As years passed many of their descendants continued to make a living from the sea. Others, however, moved to other areas of Newfoundland. Six factors led to this second-stage migration during the nineteenth century (fishery failures and higher education influenced migration in the twentieth century):

1. In the early 1800s fishermen (Cull, Osmond, Fennimore, Compton, Hancock) moved to White Bay/Northern Peninsula to work near mercantile centres established by the Slades, merchants of Fogo. By 1780 the Slades were operating their business in the north as far as Battle Harbour.

2. In the first half of the nineteenth century, after spending summers near salmon rivers, and winters near traplines living in tilts, families from Barr’d Islands (Easton, Shelley, Chaulk, Boles, Day, Canning) settled permanently in these areas. Salmon was salted and barrelled, and furs trapped to be sold to Slade and Company at Fogo, and in the second half of the century to be sold to Rolls at Barr’d Islands.

3. Around 1850 an influential merchant, James Rolls from Sturminister, Newton Castle, Dorsetshire, England, established a business in Barr’d Islands (see Chapter 15). He took control of the economy of both Barr’d Islands and Joe Batt’s Arm. (He appears to have had quite an influence with the governor in St. John’s. Barr’d Islands was singled out in some of the governors’ statistical records of the nineteenth century, while such large areas as Harbour Grace and Carbonear were included under the general heading Conception Bay North.) In the mid-1800s Rolls encouraged a northern fishery, sending schooners with crews and their families from Barr’d Islands and Joe Batt’s Arm. After migrating north for several summers, families settled in such fishing stations as Jackson’s Arm, Englee, Hooping Harbour, Ireland’s Bight, Lock’s Cove, Brehat, and Westport.

4. As the population grew, there was no space on the fishing grounds to maintain an increased number of independent fisheries. This resulted in migration to unsettled coves and islands in Notre Dame Bay and in northern regions.

5. During the 1800s families from Barr’d Islands migrated up Notre Dame Bay for winter. After sawmills were established in the late 1800s in the