THE ENGLISH ARRIVALS

English and hired help (Irish youth) arrive in Placentia after the French.

After the French evacuated Placentia, the English colonists took over the houses and fishing sites of the departed exiles. With the English came their hired help, the Irish youths who came out with their masters in fishing vessels. These hired helpers not only became good fishermen, but they learned the art of boat building, of sail making, of shaping oars, of building houses and of eventually marrying and making homes in the New Land.

Boats used

The schooners built by the English were small at first. At Placentia and in the adjacent harbours these schooners took on a strange and peculiar type known as Western boats. The Western boat undoubtedly underwent changes in appearance since it was first involved in taking fishing crews to Cape St. Mary's fishing grounds, one of the most productive of localities around the Newfoundland coast. Dried codfish was not brought to foreign markets in Newfoundland ships until the nineteenth century. British ships known as "sack ships", bought loads of dried codfish to southern Europe for four centuries before Newfoundlanders built vessels large enough to make these long voyages.

The type of schooner known as "fore and after" did not come into use until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Smaller boats carried what is known as lugger sails, and the skiffs used in working cod seines had spread sails, the spread being a stout pole used in keeping the sail in position. It was hoisted to this position by muzzle halfyards. On through the years from 1713 up to the latter quarter of the nineteenth century there was very little change in methods of fishing for cod. Perhaps the most notable variation was the introduction of larger vessels to fish on the Grand Banks. Purse seines, longliners, and motor vessels eventually replaced the old time hook and line and sinker. The cod seine skiff is one of the oldest type of fishing boats used in Newfoundland.

Business - Sweetman and Saunders

The most famous business house of the eighteenth century to be located at Placentia was the firm of Sweetman and Saunders. They built a very successful trade in fishery products and employed many local toiler and were the business life of the community. Roger Sweetman built a house on the Town Side which he named Blenheim House. This edifice stood for over a century with its cottage roof, its oak beams and antique furniture.

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