JOHN MANNION, THE HISTORICAL scholar of eighteenth-century Newfoundland, has referred to the collected mercantile papers of John Slade and Co. at the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador [PANL] as "one of the finest documented statements on ordinary life in Atlantic Canada in the late eighteenth century ..."[2] One particular document in the collection serves as an example of the degree to which "the Slades" and their planter clients operated within an intertwined, interdependent Atlantic world. It is a brief letter from Slade’s St. John’s agents, Hart and Eppes, to the Slade clerks in Fogo, informing them of where market prices for "fish" (salt cod) and salmon had settled. It is representative of hundreds of such letters that would have been sent around the Atlantic coast, spreading commercial intelligence and updating agents and clerks on wider matters relevant to their trade. What makes the letter important for the purposes of this note is the other information it contains, informing the correspondent of military developments in continental Europe. The entire mercantile complex at Newfoundland would have waited for news reports like this with no little anxiety. The letter speaks to an Atlantic mercantile mentalité and illuminates the connected, intricate world-system within which the Slades and their agents operated, and in which major political or strategic events in other parts of the system were a central preoccupation:

St. John’s, 22 August, 1799

Messrs. John Slade and Company

Sirs:

The present serves to inform you that the price of fish is broke[3] at 13/6 per qtl[4] which is done by the captain of a Jersey Brig that came here with a cargo of Salt from Cr Isles

We have sold 45 tierces[5] of new Salmon at 42/ p tierce[6] to take bread in payment at 24/ p cwt[7] nothing is said about the price of oil.

Our governor[8] is expected daily by him we hope to receive good news, the latest accounts from England are 10th instant[9] they give information of the Austrians having met a check by the French Troops but from the advantageous situation of the Austrian army twas generally believ’d they would shortly strike almost a decisive blow. The Russians have been successful in every Engagement they have had in Italy so that we hope the Italian markets will be open’d for our fish. On the other side we place our prices current and are with much esteem

Sirs

Your most obedient of Servants

Hart & Eppes[10]

Written on 22 August 1799, the Slade letter expresses optimism that Italian markets would soon be opened for the Slades’ dried cod. Italian markets for Newfoundland fish were in a state of utter turmoil that summer due to the upheaval in Europe at the hands of the French revolutionary armies. Great Britain had entered into a grand alliance, the Second Coalition, with Russia, Austria, the Ottoman Empire, and a collection of German and Italian states to oppose rampant French military expansion throughout the continent and beyond. In April of 1799, the French had met their match in the guise of a considerable Austrian force in northern Italy, and by the summer the Russian army had arrived and was successfully dislodging the French from their Italian holdings. By the end of the year the Russians had chased the French out of Italy and into the Swiss Alps. Napoleon took his leave of Egypt on 23 August, the day after the Slade letter was written, leaving his battered and plague-weakened army behind. The French fleet had been destroyed by the British under Admiral Nelson a year earlier at the Battle of the Nile and Napoleon was on his way back to Europe to deal with the setbacks there.[11]

John Slade and Sons was the principal merchant house in Notre Dame Bay at the end of the eighteenth century. Fogo Island (and later Twillingate) served as the Slades base of operations, though the firm had subsidiary concerns along the coast and at Labrador. John Slade, the founder, had an early career that was almost mundane in its typicality for a Newfoundland merchant: apprenticed into the mariner’s trade at an early age by his father in Poole, Dorset, he was by 1750 commanding a ship in the employ of the Poole Quaker Joseph White. In 1753 he acquired his own ship and continued in the Newfoundland trade on his own account. He had become familiar with routes out of Poole to Ireland, northern Newfoundland, and Portugal and no doubt saw that new areas opening up to the north of Bonavista Bay offered as yet untried and potentially lucrative opportunities. Though the French had fishing rights in Notre Dame Bay until 1783, this was in no way a deterrent to Slade and others setting up operations in the region prior to that date. The Treaty of Versailles (1783) adjusted the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and eliminated French rights in the area by moving the southern limit for the French Shore northward and westward from Cape Bonavista to Cape St. John. Jeremiah Coghlan was another pioneering merchant in the area. He had substantial operations at Fogo, including fortifications and a small battery, by the time of the American Revolution, and he operated with the blessings and encouragement of Governor Palliser. The Labrador merchant and diarist George Cartwright obtained a schooner from Coghlan, and used Fogo as a base for his initial trips to the Labrador. By 1770, Fogo had emerged as a regional emporium; Cartwright procured chickens and goats there too.[12]

The English had been trickling into the numerous hidden coves and harbours north of Bonavista since at least 1720. In that year, George Skeffington petitioned London for permission to move into areas north of Bonavista to commence operating a salmon fishery. Interestingly, even at that early date, the potentially lucrative seal fishery was being touted as an important reason to move north. William Keen, the ill-starred St. John’s merchant, wrote in support of Skeffington’s plan and highlighted that, in addition to salmon and seals, winter fur trapping was also a potentially attractive pursuit in the lands bordering Notre Dame Bay. One Thomas Tizzard may have been "the first person that ever drove a nail at Twillingate" in the year 1728. Until 1783, the English in the area were in a state of annual low-level conflict with the French, who had been granted permission to operate seasonal shore stations under the Treaty of Utrecht, but for whom annual arguments over shore rights were an irritating way of life. Peripheral parts of the French Atlantic world had long been losing a sense of connectedness to an administrative core, while their English counterparts enjoyed robust naval and political support, albeit sporadic in the case of Newfoundland. French complaints of English encroachment therefore fell on deaf official ears. Official French testimony in 1769 complains of troublesome English "sieurs" including "le sieur Crokland [sic] à Fougue" and "les sieurs Mons et Slad [sic] à Toulinguet" who were disrupting French operations. Regardless of whether the strict letter of the 1713 treaty allowed them to settle there, the English were familiar enough with the area to know of all its economic attractions well before the 1783 treaty clearly solidified their claim in international law. The English had longstanding designs on Notre Dame Bay: a well-known mariners’ navigation rhyme from the 1750s indicates the British presence in the region was by then long-lived enough for them to have assigned English names to all of the principal geographic features around Fogo Island:

Then nor’ west by west, twelve miles or more,

There lies Round Head on Fogo’s shore,

But nor’-nor’ west seven or eight miles,

Lies a sunken rock near Barrack’s Isles.

Therefore, my friend, I would you advise,

Since all these rocks in danger lies,

That you may never amongst them fall,

But keep your luff and weather them all.

As you draw near to the Fogo land,

You’ll have fifteen fathoms in the sounding sand, —

From fifteen to eighteen, never more,

And that you’ll have close to the shore.

When you abreast of Round Head be,

Then Joe Batt’s Point you’ll plainly see;

To starboard then three or four miles,

You’ll see a parcel of damn rugged Isles.

In addition, by 1775 Michael Lane had surveyed the area and noted the many English place names in the Fogo-Twillingate area, such as Round Head and the Barrack Rocks. Lane’s work completed Captain Cook’s chart of Newfoundland, which had been commissioned by the Admiralty and was accepted as official by Act of Parliament in May 1775. The British Atlantic had expanded into Notre Dame Bay.[13]

By the early 1780s, British commerce in Notre Dame Bay had become formalized and intense, with all the attendant settlement and social growth. When the swashbuckling Coghlan went spectacularly bankrupt in 1782, Slade likely snapped up Coghlan’s operations and planter-clients to consolidate his own position. Benjamin Lester, the principle merchant in Trinity, had tentacles reaching into Notre Dame Bay as well. The Fogo area, and Tilting in particular, seems to have evolved as an outpost of, or feeder operation for, Trinity. The canny Lester installed an Irish agent, William Ryan, at Tilting, which was by the 1780s the only predominantly Irish and Catholic settlement north of King’s Cove, Bonavista Bay. Slade dealt with all of the Irish planters at Tilting, and the Slade ledgers show other Irish scattered throughout the Bay. It is important to note that during this early period of the development of Notre Dame Bay, Irish migrants would have been operating under a legal regime as well as an administrative mindset that was deeply suspicious of them, as evidenced by this 1765 opinion offered by pamphleteer Captain Griffith Williams: "The Irish Romish Catholics are useful as Servants, but very dangerous in this Part of the World, when in power." The Irish ethnic cluster that deliberately formed in Tilting may have been a response to English hegemony in the region. It may also be evidence of a more robust Irish commercial culture than has heretofore been acknowledged.[14]

Slade became the principal merchant operator in Notre Dame Bay by prosecuting a resource extraction business that was unique in Newfoundland, at that time, for the variety of products he shipped out of the bay. Inventories show many types of furs as well as salmon, both rough and processed lumber, dried cod, train oil, seal oil, blubber, berries, feathers, and, importantly, different types of seal pelts. Slade’s mercantile competency resided in his ability to recognize a variety of opportunities in the new region and, perhaps most importantly, the importance of Fogo and Twillingate as launching points for voyages to the Labrador. His success also implies a talent in dealing with potentially mutinous Irish planters as well as an earlier skill in muscling out the persistent French fishers who had rights in this Atlantic borderland until 1783. Peaceful commercial co-existence with the Irish should not be casually assumed. The Catholic Irish at Newfoundland had their religion strictly proscribed in the eighteenth century and lived under an essentially discriminatory legal regime. It was a world where the merchants were all English and all the Irish were servants. Charles de la Morandière’s collected testimonies from aggrieved French fishing captains and ship-owners contain multiple references to the Irish and the French working in concert to thwart the English in Notre Dame Bay in the 1760s. They informed each other on English movements, worked in concert to vandalize English fishing structures, and even partied together on occasion. An Irish sense of alliance with the French remained until recent times a part of the oral cultural tradition of the Irish in Notre Dame Bay, in the form of songs and patriotic recitations. The increasingly unstable Beothuk element presented a further challenge to Slade, and there are multiple reports of violent confrontation between settlers and the few remaining Beothuk who, by the late 1780s, witnessed their last access to coastline disappearing under a creeping blanket of European settlement. Traumatized, they began to lash out at the interloping Europeans. Trinity merchant Benjamin Lester reported that, among other things, Beothuk raiders stole fishing gear and killed cows at Tilting, Fogo Island, in 1789. Slade and his agents skillfully addressed the caprices of a borderland micro-economy where they harvested a broad variety of products in conjunction, and sometimes competition, with peoples who were, on occasion, hostile to them.[15]

The last ten years have seen the number of publications and conferences devoted to the British Atlantic world increase in both volume and diversity. Strangely, only a small number of Newfoundland historians have explicitly grasped the new perspective. In recent works, Peter Pope and Jerry Bannister have placed Newfoundland firmly in an Atlantic world that is referenced in terms more sophisticated than simply geographic. Luca Codignola and John Reid have recently suggested that Newfoundland’s place in the Atlantic world was far more prominent than historians have heretofore allowed, and have argued for a more rigorous application of the Atlanticist perspective to Newfoundland’s early modern past. The "new" Atlanticist history proposes that the ocean in the early modern era is a valid unit of analysis in all its chaotic, swirling greatness. Just as Fernand Braudel saw a Mediterranean "world" in the time of Philippe II with its own internal operating logic and identifiable, discrete economic system, so do Atlantic world advocates view the entire Atlantic rim as contiguous historical frame, worthy of specific study, as such. National boundaries are disregarded in favour of a relaxed definition of connectedness that has culture, ideas, and ethnicity as its definitional borders. This Atlantic, primarily a British one, is viewed as a highway rather than a barrier and linkages, heretofore unexplored, are creatively factored into the narrative. Some of the recent work on the British Atlantic explores ways in which diverse peoples who might not have otherwise been in one another’s company were thrust together in borderlands at the edge of empire, and how their membership in a larger world-system informed their experience and shaped their historical footprint. The approach has proven a popular way for scholars to reframe traditional questions surrounding migration, commerce, and the formation of hybrid societies on the very edge of the dynamic Anglo-Atlantic world.[16]

Much of the work in the field has come out of a small number of American universities, and the principal proponent of the movement has been Bernard Bailyn of Harvard. Alison Games has recently proposed that Atlantic history is not only a spatial definition but is, as well, a "style of inquiry" that seeks patterns in the new types of interactions that occurred as early modern Europeans, Africans, and New World Aboriginal communities clashed in various venues and in numerous ways around the huge ocean and its concomitant seas. It may be that historians of eighteenth-century America, with their Frontier Thesis and central revolutionary event, turned their backs on an Atlantic that they are only now rediscovering with fresh eyes. Canadians, and perhaps Newfoundlanders especially so, maintained psychological as well as economic connections to a British Atlantic that, though strained on occasion, always remained in place. Atlantic world historians have been particularly intrigued with questions of conflict and negotiation at the periphery of the British Atlantic économie-monde, where it grated against, and eventually subsumed, Aboriginal cultures. In these borderlands — Baylin uses the archaic but apt term "marchlands" — hybrid micro-societies and economies formed, splintered, and re-formed again, as newly arrived Europeans of varying national backgrounds scrambled chaotically in, seeking to get the first claim on resources. Eventually, legal regimes were established and order was proclaimed.[17]

A long but thin string of historians have described Newfoundland’s immigrations and economic developments on the edge of the Atlantic. But those works have not delved into how the particularities of an essential "Atlanticness" are responsible for a large part of the Newfoundland experience. In Newfoundland historiography the Atlantic was, for the most part, a troublesome and dangerous barrier to be crossed. Few of our historians have sought to explore how a larger Atlantic world, the Atlantic of the slave trade, of revolution, and of large-scale cultural sharing, defined their Newfoundland subjects. To be fair, the number of Newfoundland historians looking at eighteenth-century topics is limited. This would explain why a venue like Notre Dame Bay in northern Newfoundland, where multiple cultures experienced sustained interaction on the verge of the British Atlantic in what amounts to a fascinating Atlanticist case study, has gone virtually unstudied. It was an Atlantic marchland where English, French, Irish, and Beothuk peoples competed for limited resources and where they interacted in ways that were new for all involved.

An Atlanticist approach to the writing of Newfoundland’s early modern history would afford more consideration of the full extent to which broader Atlantic events affected daily life at Newfoundland. The Slade letter, above, is a simple but poignant example of this. Perhaps more importantly, the perspective might highlight the adaptive and inquisitive modes of thought that were the hallmark of the more successful members of the merchant class. The Slades were exceptionally long-lived, even by Newfoundland standards. The last Slade firm was sold in Newfoundland in the 1860s. When viewed through the peephole of the Atlanticist perspective, a simple mercantile outpost in Notre Dame Bay becomes a crucible for observing cultural and mercantile exchange in a chaotic but profoundly interconnected Anglo-Atlantic world.[18]

Peter Pope has recently proposed a corollary to the idea that historians of early modern Newfoundland can learn more about their area of specialization by adopting an Atlanticist approach. Pope has challenged the large and growing community of British Atlantic scholars to advance their own understanding by looking more closely at elements of Newfoundland’s past heretofore ignored in the wider Atlantic world literature. It is also a call for Newfoundland historians to engage this important new school and present Newfoundland’s case in what is an exciting and important new academic arena.[19]

apdwyer@mun.ca