Acland’s Letters: Second Letter
Newfoundland: St John’s
St John’s Newfoundland to Halifax
July 26, 1860
Arrival at St John’s
We are again under Steam on board the Hero. We entered St John’s Harbour about 7 P.M. on Monday the 23rd but on that Evening we did not land. The Commandant of the Troops, Major Grant, with Mr. Cowen, the Governor’s Secretary, came off. The Captain of the Ariadne, Captain Vansittart, & Captain Cloné, Commander of a French Surveying Ship, and others came off. We came to anchor after salutes from the Shore, amid the cheers of the multitudes who covered the heights of the land locked harbour. The Evening was splendid, and we felt the rest and balmy breeze acceptable after our buffeting. You may imagine that we had no small expectations as we went to bed later than usual of what would happen on the morrow, the first day that the new duties of the Prince of Wales would be entered upon – on the feelings & opinions of these important Colonies fairly met. A Steamer besides was expected, and we wrote letters to be in readiness when she arrived. It is said that every person engaged in an action would give a different account of it – so I can only profess to tell you what fell under my own observation. It would appear perhaps to the Statesman a meagre and partial view – but as I make a rule as far as I can of not interfering in the political affairs of our Tour, and as I do interfere to master certain other points which are of general interest, and not without importance in themselves you will have only of necessity what presents itself to the Physician’s mental, as well as bodily eye. Still you shall have some account of our ceremonials, for indeed at St John’s whatever may be elsewhere, these ceremonials are not without their significance. But first in order to understand the general condition of these colonial countries in the North of the Atlantic whether geographically and politically, a few words – or if you are well read concerning them, a few general thoughts are needed.
Geography
The great peculiarity of these Colonies in a geographical sense excluding for now all geological considerations is to be found in two circumstances chiefly – first in their sea board relation to the Gulf stream, and the Atlantic in general – secondly in their connexion with the great American Continent.
The consequences of these circumstances are a mild sea board by summer, a hot inland temperature at the same period; intense cold from the radiation of the Continent by winter. On the coast in some places and at Newfoundland especially the breaking up of the Arctic ice fields causes the descent of these Arctic masses laden with their living cargoes of Seals. These peculiarities alone make a peculiar population. The very extensive coasts produce and almost necessitate a hardy class of seamen employed in the Fisheries. Some Fisheries are immediately on the coast – others are on banks out of sight of land – others as the Seal Fisheries so called run up to Labrador and to the lands & seas of the Esquimaux.
I need hardly ask you to look at the map, who know it so well, but only to bear these general facts in mind, and to couple them with the recollection of the vast sea board which Labrador, the great Laurentine gulf, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward’s Island respectively & collectively display.
This Gabota or Cabot took possession of Newfoundland for Henry 8th & received Bishop Mullock says £10 for his discovery.
Early history
Two conditions must be also borne in mind in considering the people politically – The one their ancient – the other their modern character.11
I will not now enter on this subject – Arthur Mills may expound it by his book or by his lips, or pen. Suffice it that I remark 1st that the tribes called generally Indian appear to have spread generally at one period or another over all the districts I have named – 2nd that after America had been discovered by Columbus some of the Northern districts were explored or at least visited by an Italian who resided in Bristol, John Cabot,22 only 5 years after Columbus had been to S. America. This Gabota or Cabot took possession of Newfoundland for Henry 8th & received Bishop Mullock says £10 for his discovery. Not many years after an enterprising Frenchman, Jacques Cartier, visited the island naming many places therein. The result of this I take it was that the French took a fancy to the island, and commenced to jostle Sir George Calvert to whom much land had been granted till he left and founded Baltimore. Hinc longae ambages (long is the tale: Virgil, Aeniad, l.328). The English had their claim, and did little for it – the French had their desires, which they took pains to gratify.33 From that until now, a feud & a strong jealousy not yet quelled nor likely to be has existed at the entrance to the St. Lawrence, and up its banks into Canada. The French made enormous efforts at this and at that place to possess & retain dominion in these districts – and we at various times but with too little judgment or consistency of plan, and often with much injustice mixed in our policy have succeeded in retaining a half paralyzed hold. Religious feelings were not absent to provoke strife. Generally Romanish the French had the power, & the ambition & the tact not to say the unscrupulousness of the Romish Priesthood to aid them in maintaining a great Nursery for seamen – and we if we had the purity of our Church, or its freedom from gross superstition to look to for aid, had also its want of energy in the last century – its luke-warmness – its want of imagination – and disunion which the Protestant principle dragged into its wake.
Large seaboards then wholly or partially expelled aborigines, a fierce internal heat by summer, an inclement winter, a mixed race mixed in interest & in creed, boundless treasures of food in the seas, a rugged and arduous soil will meet us wherever in this 1860 we examine any portion of the Territory of these American Colonies.
It was fortunate that we visited Newfoundland first. It is the Colony which is in all respects the least developed. It offers therefore the simplest problem for study. Less is known of its interior and there are therefore fewer objects to distract the attention. The occupations of the people are simple – fishing is the chief staple – but it is fishing on a large scale: upon this simple basis are engrafted however all the complexities which I have described above.
You shall now hear what we did and saw impeded though my pen is by the vibrations of the ever churning screw.
As the number of European fishing encampments increased along the Newfoundland coastline, the Beothuk population was driven into the interior.
Acland observed that Newfoundland was the least developed of the British North American colonies.
Concurrent with the British commercial exploitation of the Newfoundland fisheries, French fishing ships had arrived every spring for centuries.
Formal proceedings
We landed at 12. It had rained all day, but happily cleared to the great comfort of the people, and to the saving of our resplendent uniforms. The streets were lined on either side by societies, such as benefit societies, freemasons and various corporations, the whole way to the Governor’s House.44 We went in carriages. The Chief Justice of the Island, Sir Francis Brady, gave up his carriage to two of us. His wig went inside and he with excessive zeal out – and the horse jibbing at a hill he drove with energy & success. At the Governor’s house Addresses were immediately presented by the Legislature, the Clergy, i.e. the Protestant Bishop & the Roman Catholic Bishop, and the dissenting bodies. They received one & all a joint answer which unfortunately began Gentlemen. The Protestant Bishop & Clergy had prepared an admirable one, and gave due notice of it according to the Regulations; the Romish did not – and were therefore not entitled to an answer or even to acceptance. But they are the dominant party by far in St John’s and it was deemed undesirable, if not unjust to refuse them and so the address prepared for one Church was made to serve both purposes. The Romish Bishop, Bishop Mullock, is an able and most energetic person. I fear I ought to give my impression that he is probably a violent politician and therefore partisan. He has collected & expended it is said £80,000 for his diocese in 12 years. His Cathedral and other buildings I hope by & by to advert to again. There was a Levee afterwards in which the Prince stood on a little platform & received the addresses after they were read handing them to the Duke of Newcastle on his left – Lord St Germains read out the people’s names, and the Equerries, showed them in or rather passed their cards as at a Levee at home. General Bruce, the Duke’s Secretary & myself stood on his right. About 300 attended – afterwards there was Luncheon, quietly, and we took off our uniforms. The Governor’s residence is a large spacious house – one of the best Colonial residences. He is an aged strong bodied Scotchman and Lady Bannerman a splendid Scotch Dame of measured forms of speech & of person.55
The procession and the protocol of ceremonials at St John’s were repeated in the other towns and cities along the route of the royal tour.
Before his appointment to Newfoundland, Bannerman had begun his career as colonial administrator at the age of sixty three: first, as governor of Prince Edward Island, the birthplace of his wife who was the daughter of its first governor; and then in Bermuda.
Anglican Bishop and College
After Luncheon was a ride, which I might have joined but I thought it more right to go to see the Bishop who had invited me to his residence.66 Thus I was necessarily obliged to decline, though with regret. I was received by his Lordship with much kindness. He showed me an inkstand Tom gave him, and which he so valued that he would not use it, and never had, nor one of the pens which were in its case. He talked over the affairs of the Church for some time, and of the Colony. He admitted that the Romish Church was altogether ascendant in St John’s numerically & politically. In the Island the numbers are much in favour of the Protestants, but unhappily the Protestants do not pull together – but the dissenters are wont to side with the Romanists against our Church. The Cathedral service is twice daily. I went with the Bishop at 5 and was cheered by the sweet repose of the reverent prayer. The Church is handsome, though unfinished.77 It wholly wants transepts and the choir being but the nave. It is well built and is a rather fine example of a plain & capacious Early English Cathedral Church. Much of the stone came from Ireland.
After service I met a Mr Phelps, accompanied by his sister. The latter to my astonishment proved to be Mary Phelps of Madeira – the former a Clergyman in St John’s – I went to their house which is a Theological Training College – There are only 2 Students & those were away. It is a nice Institution, and I believe Phelps to be a very intelligent well informed zealous person. In the yard were a number of black geese which came and pecked at his hand. He was of much use to me by directing me how next day best to employ myself.
I omitted to say that before luncheon there was a review of the Volunteers, a very fine body of about two companies of well drilled men.
I did not get in till dinner – we dressed in plain black with white cravats which I mention because every day we are told what we are to dress in. The Governor having no white cravats borrowed one from one of the Prince’s footmen, and with much simplicity narrated the fact at dinner to the Prince.
The luke-warmness of the eighteenth-century Anglican Church prior to its nineteenth-century revival as well as Newfoundland’s status as a fishery had hampered the Church’s development in Newfoundland.
A fierce battle of architectural styles had been waged since the 1830s.
Naval surveyor
At dinner, I sat next to Captain Orlebar, an old messmate of Baldwin’s in the Seringapatam. He is a surveying Officer – has been on this coast surveying for 25 years88 – his wife living at Prince Edward’s Island. He is an accomplished Surveyor – of great goodness of disposition and a religious man. Our conversation lay chiefly on the mysteries of his Art – and on the mode of triangulation he employs on the coast. He has a steamer of 60 tons and a Schooner of 200: takes his measurements all summer and winters at home recording & drawing up his work. He says there are many years yet left before Newfoundland will be completed surveying even in respect of its coast. The interior is little known. But it is known that it contains Bears, Wolves, Deer in great plenty, some large species but not the Moose – and white Foxes. At the same dinner were various Government officials; and a Captain Cloné, a French Surveying Captain.
As a British naval surveyor, Captain John Orlebar spent some twenty years developing charts as aids to navigation along the coastlines of the St Lawrence River and the Gulf of St Lawrence.
Unfortunately by the treaty of Utrecht (1713) we ceded to them a small island, St Pierre, together with the right of fishing in the Newfoundland banks.
Rivalry of French fisheries
The French are engaged in making the most elaborate charts of their Fishing ground.99 Unfortunately by the treaty of Utrecht (1713) we ceded to them a small island, St Pierre, together with the right of fishing in the Newfoundland banks. This St Pierre is most favourably situated at the South West angle of Newfoundland at the entrance of the St Lawrence Channel. They are bound by treaty not to fortify – but they have done so – and the old treaty of 1713 has been twice ratified since. At no great distance from St Pierre is our possession of Sidney on Cape Breton. Here are extensive coal fields. To have them attacked would be to maim under the new methods of steam power our supremacy in these seas. As you will learn by and by we visited both St Pierre and Sidney.
The day following (Wednesday the 25th) I spent mainly in matters connected with my own pursuits. I visited the Lunatic Asylum, the Hospital, and the most important fish curing establishment, where cod liver oil is prepared – had much conversation with Dr Stabb whose exertions have procured the foundation of the Lunatic Asylum, with Dr Crowdy, a district Medical Officer, and with Mess. Rochfort and McCann who have charge of the Hospital.
Although the abundance of fish and separate, distinct markets meant there was little cause for rivalry among fishermen from France and England, three global wars between the two great powers and the treaties signed as settlements created long-standing tensions in the Newfoundland fisheries.
Asylum
The Lunatic Asylum is three miles from the Town, a neat brick building. The bricks are brought from Boston as none are made in the Colony. Dr Stabb is an Edinburgh graduate evidently attached to his work. The Asylum1010 is small in its dimensions but otherwise well arranged & well kept. It has been the subject of a special Memorandum by Miss Dix, given to me by the Governor. I was struck by finding a steam engine at work for pumping water, and other purposes in the house, kept always at work day & night and capable of throwing an unlimited supply of water in case of fire. There is no supply of books, or fund for amusement of the Inmates. The management of the Asylum is bad in this respect. It is under the control of the Government Board of Works. Nothing can be done or is done without the sanction of this official. Not a servant dismissed, nor a work executed without his order. The consequences may be readily told. If the official is not friendly towards the Medical man, nothing is done or it is done wrong, or imperfectly or with delay. However in New Brunswick as I see in their annual Report the method works well.
When the St John’s asylum opened in 1854, inmates were treated in accordance with the revolutionary theory of moral therapy, the ‘traitement moral’ advocated during the 1790s particularly by Philippe Pinel, a French physician.
Riverhead Hospital
The Hospital deserves no special comment. It is like the Asylum maintained & managed by the Government. The Medical Officers are jointly responsible for the Patients – evidently a bad arrangement. Private practitioners may treat cases there – but then those Patients pay for their maintenance about 12s a week. In many respects the Hospital is bad – in all unworthy.1111 Bad and deficient latrines – and a new wing of the same mean height as the old, about 8 feet high wood, and on the ground floor bad light & worse ventilation leave much to be desired. But in truth it is far more than I had expected that there should be any. The Medical Officers are paid each £125 annually. The credit of getting the Hospital into any order is due to Dr Carson who is lately deceased and was Dr Crowdy’s partner.
Riverhead Hospital was mostly for the indigent poor; other patients commonly received medical care in their own homes.
The quantity of good medicinal [cod liver] oil exported this year from Newfoundland alone will be 150 tons.
Cod liver oil
There are two methods of making the Cod-liver oil.1212 On one Mr Archibald, the inventor, consulted me – but I was unable to offer any sound advice on the value of his proposal. He noticing that a portion of the oil is precipitated in frost, has artificially precipitated it by ice. This may be and perhaps is the Stearine – After this has been done the Oil always remains clear. He asked me whether this method improved or injured the Medicinal properties of the Oil. This it was I had no means of answering – probably not. The secret of making good & pleasant oil is in having the fresh liver, and keeping the recent oil obtained by boiling or steaming the livers free from all impurity and decomposed matters. Generally this is not done. On the contrary – the whole apparatus is one mass of putrescence – I tasted two or three samples without any flavour whatever, at least none in any way disagreeable. The quantity of good medicinal oil exported this year from Newfoundland alone will be 150 tons. I have many statistics of this manufacture, and of the number and occupation of the people according to the last Census given to me partly by Dr Crowdy, partly by the Chief Justice.
For some time, cod liver oil from the fisheries in Norway and Newfoundland had been included in the materia medica, a medical pharmaceutical list, as beneficial in the treatment of rheumatism and tuberculosis and had more recently become popular as a general strengthener. Advertisements for Mr Archibald’s cod liver oil appeared in The Times in 1860 and his oil was assessed in medical journals like The Lancet for their purity and absence of odour. When Acland was asked for his medical opinion on the chilling process used by Mr Archibald, he refers to stearine, a triglyceride by-product obtained during this process.
Military hospital
I visited also the Military Hospital1313 a poor and costly building – healthily placed. It was built by our Government – which accounts for the two qualities above named. There were happily but three patients in it, one of small pox, a sailor of ours, whom it was thought necessary to land, and to leave behind us.
In his visit to the Military Hospital, built in 1851, Acland found a sailor removed from the royal squadron with smallpox.
. . . there is more astir in Newfoundland than fog & Cod fish.
Roman Catholic Bishop
I mentioned that the Romish Church has much the superiority in St John’s in respect of numbers & influence politically speaking. I thought it therefore well to go & call upon Bishop Mullock1414. I found him a strong and energetic man. He conversed freely enough – for he saw plainly that I was interested in knowing what facilities of education, or of social & temporal improvement the people had – that as a Physician it was not for me to consider from whom they had these benefits – but what they had & how. We therefore went over [to] his Cathedral, as I said a fine building of the very unpoetical glaring Italian kind1515 – admirably adapted for warm Italy & colour, little for these Northern climates & cold skies. He has built a great Convent for Sisters of Mercy who visit at home – for Sisters of the Presentation, who educate in the convent – a College for Theological Students – and an Orphanage. The rooms in the Convent1616 were as well furnished and as handsome in proportion as the Government House. Industrial Arts are taught – embroidery to the Girls -Weaving & other work to the boys.
By all this you will gather there is more astir in Newfoundland than fog & Cod fish.
In the Evening there was a ball – 600 persons – all of us in full Uniform – I did not dance, nor sup – but it was pleasant to see the pleased faces and the enthusiasm of the people.
The Limerick-born, Roman Catholic bishop, John Mullock, led a flock of Irish Roman Catholics, many of them Gaelic speakers, who in 1860 constituted a majority of the population.
The massive Roman Catholic Cathedral of St John the Baptist was both a reflection of the Irish presence in Newfoundland and an expression of a particular religious stance.
By the 1830’s, the first Roman Catholic Bishop, Michael Fleming, looked to provide education for the Irish populace.
Meteorology
The next morning, Thursday, though we had gone to bed about 3, I went to breakfast with Major Baillie, the commandant of the Engineers.1717
I was anxious to see his Meteorological Register. I found excellent Thermometers wet & dry – max. & min. – Anemometer, rain-guage & Barometer, mostly by Casella, admirably kept – and was greatly pleased by the business-like & gentlemanly officer-like character of the Commandant – His wife was a Devonshire lady who knew Killerton well.1818
We embarked at 11 A.M. this day July 26.
Nothing could be more satisfactory in every respect than this our first visit. I felt naturally anxious, and was somewhat fatigued – The passage out had of course afforded time for us all to shake together. I also much to read up of Colonial History which all else had been prepared in. And therefore then, and in Newfoundland had rather more on hand than consisted with a holiday. Still it was well bestowed & I can now I hope use my time both with advantage & pleasure.
Major Baillie, the commandant of the Royal Engineers, was responsible for maintaining a meteorological register.
Connections through the university, the Church, the military, the gentry, and through siblings in large families made nineteenth-century England a linked network.
Contextualized notes provided by Jane Rupert
Contextualized Notes
As the number of European fishing encampments increased along the Newfoundland coastline, the Beothuk population was driven into the interior. Deprived of their plentiful, traditional sources of fish and seal and forced to become overly-dependent on caribou, they faced undernourishment and starvation. The moose, today so bountiful in Newfoundland, were introduced only in 1904. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Beothuk faced extinction through a scarcity of food, a hunt disrupted by the trap lines of fur traders, through infectious diseases like smallpox contracted through European contact, and by violent encounters with trappers and settlers. In 1769, John Byron, seasonal governor and grandfather of the Romantic poet, Lord Byron, had criminalized violence against the Beothuk and in 1807 another seasonal governor prohibited their maltreatment, but justice outside St John’s was sporadic, seasonal, and difficult to administer.
Acland observed that Newfoundland was the least developed of the British North American colonies. Although it was the first explored, Newfoundland remained undeveloped because Britain discouraged permanent settlement. Until 1825, when it finally attained the status of a colony, it had remained a fishing station under naval government.
Newfoundland’s centuries as a seasonal fishing station with a migratory fishing population began with John Cabot’s explorations of its waters in 1497 in search of a sea route to the markets of the Far East after the old, overland Silk Routes were closed to Europeans by the Ottoman Turks. A Venetian, Cabot sailed from Bristol, a prosperous centre trading fish from Iceland with the markets of mainland Europe. However, instead of a route to the East, Cabot discovered the bountiful cod fisheries of Newfoundland and the Grand Banks. Here, as off the coast of Iceland, nutrients raised to the surface by cold ocean currents mixing with warmer currents create some of the world’s most fertile fishing grounds. A small British colony was attempted in the 1620s by Sir George Calvert (Lord Baltimore), whose sons subsequently established a colony in Maryland, and a population connected to the fisheries grew slowly through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, British administrators continued to maintain that a resident population was undesirable. A migratory fishery meant that the prosperous West Country merchants from southern England who had dominated the market since the seventeenth century could maintain their control. It also fulfilled the second important function of the fisheries as a “nursery for seamen,” providing seasoned mariners for service in the British navy.
The migratory population also spared Britain the expense of a resident colonial administration. In the early days of the fishery, a “fishing admiral,” the captain of the first ship to enter the harbour at the beginning of the season, administered justice. This often consisted of ten lashes on the back for petty crime such as theft of supplies. Later, after a naval convoy began accompanying the English fishing fleet, the commodore became a seasonal governor. He administered the affairs of the fishing station from his flagship in St John’s Harbour until a civil governor was appointed in 1825 and the handsome official residence visited by the Prince of Wales was built.
Concurrent with the British commercial exploitation of the Newfoundland fisheries, French fishing ships had arrived every spring for centuries. In 1534, when Jacques Cartier passed through the Strait of Belle Isle, he found places with French names like Blanc Sablon already given by a generation of French fishermen. By 1680, Newfoundland was more French than English. What became known as the French Shore extended for nearly 1,000 miles northward from the English shore located in the region of St John’s. On the south east, French fishermen plied not only the off-shore waters of the Grand Banks, salting their catch aboard their ships, but also established numerous small settlements on shore and on the islands of St Pierre and Miquelon to dry and cure salted cod in the wind and sun and store their gear over the winter. Then in 1662, coinciding with the colonization of New France, Louis XIV established a fortified settlement nearby at Plaisance, later renamed Placentia by the English, as a strategic military base at the entrance to the Gulf of St Lawrence.
The procession and the protocol of ceremonials at St John’s were repeated in the other towns and cities along the route of the royal tour. During the procession to the Governor’s residence, the route was lined with members of benevolent societies that were the warp and woof of colonial communities. Organizations like the Odd Fellows or Newfoundland’s Irish Benevolent Society provided both fraternity and financial help to fellow members in time of need. The Freemasons, a fraternal society that had come to prominence in the eighteenth-century in England, had spread throughout the Empire. The Volunteer forces reviewed by the Prince were established in 1859 in Britain as well as in some colonies for patriotic home defense when British troops were deployed elsewhere. In the British House of Commons, Acland’s brother-in-law, Arthur Mills, was an ardent promoter of self defense in the colonies, in part to reduce Britain’s enormous imperial expenditure. At the Governor’s residence, the Prince of Wales was greeted by Sir Alexander Bannerman and welcomed with addresses which, in accordance with protocol established by the Duke of Newcastle, were to be submitted first in writing to the Duke to allow him to prepare a reply for the Prince.
Before his appointment to Newfoundland, Bannerman had begun his career as colonial administrator at the age of sixty three: first, as governor of Prince Edward Island, the birthplace of his wife who was the daughter of its first governor; and then in Bermuda. While at school in Scotland, Lady Bannerman, née Margaret Gordon, had been the first love of Thomas Carlyle, the prominent nineteenth-century intellectual who at the time was a school master in Kirkcaldy. Her superior intellectual gifts and social ambitions generated the rumour that she gave direction both to her husband’s career and to the governor’s office.
The luke-warmness of the eighteenth-century Anglican Church prior to its nineteenth-century revival as well as Newfoundland’s status as a fishery had hampered the Church’s development in Newfoundland. In 1860, Bishop Edward Feild presided over a vast diocese extending for 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) from Bermuda to the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador where in the summer months he travelled along rugged coastlines to visit migratory fishermen and remote outports. Faced with the difficulty of attracting clergymen to Newfoundland, about half were provided by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, a missionary organization established in 1701 to bring Anglican worship to settlers in British colonies through establishing new churches and through supporting school masters. Acland met one of these missionaries, a clergyman originally from Madeira, who was principal of the theological training college founded to strengthen the diocese’s independence from its parent church in Britain by training local ministers. Considered a delightful man socially, Bishop Feild was a formidable administrator who was uncompromising in matters of church doctrine, imposed conditions even on church donations, and refused joint ventures with the Methodists. Both Acland and Feild represent the traditional Anglican position that Roman Catholic practices and the Church’s ambitions for power had corrupted Christianity’s purity of doctrine.
A fierce battle of architectural styles had been waged since the 1830s. Associations like the Cambridge Camden Society and the Ecclesiological Movement advocated a return to the symbolic richness and aesthetic splendour of the late Middle Ages as an architectural expression of the spiritual aspirations of the soul. The Anglican Cathedral of St John the Baptist was built from a design by Sir Gilbert Scott, the century’s pre-eminent Gothic Revival architect. It set the direction both for church architecture and for the Church itself in Newfoundland. Pointed arches, interior traceries, and upwardly soaring columns stood in contrast doctrinally and architecturally with the plainness of Methodist churches furnished simply with pulpits and reading tables in accordance with the Methodist claim that Scripture alone was the path to holiness. In 1860, only the nave of the cathedral was completed, the transept was finished in 1885, and the pointed spire still remains unbuilt.
As a British naval surveyor, Captain John Orlebar spent some twenty years developing charts as aids to navigation along the coastlines of the St Lawrence River and the Gulf of St Lawrence. He then continued his work in Newfoundland, plumbing the depths and shallows to establish places for good anchorage, observing tides and charting currents, and making recommendations for lighthouses. To Acland’s delight, the congenial captain joined the royal tour to pilot the Hero safely through the waters of the Atlantic provinces.
Captain Orlebar was not the first naval surveyor of Newfoundland. After the Seven Years’ War, from 1763-67 James Cook surveyed the coastlines of Newfoundland and St Pierre and Miquelon, delineating where the French could still fish and setting such a high standard for hydrography that his map was still in use 200 years later. Cook had first apprenticed as a marine surveyor during the Seven Years’ War when he charted the St Lawrence River and sounded its channels enabling the British fleet to move up the river to make its surprise arrival at Quebec. The year after he completed his marine survey of Newfoundland, Captain Cook made his first voyage (1768-71) to Brazil, Tahiti, and Australia, accompanied by Joseph Banks, the renowned collector of plants who first made his reputation with a Linnean description of plants in Newfoundland and Labrador observed as botanist aboard the survey ship in 1766.
Although the abundance of fish and separate, distinct markets meant there was little cause for rivalry among fishermen from France and England, three global wars between the two great powers and the treaties signed as settlements created long-standing tensions in the Newfoundland fisheries. The War of the Spanish Succession, which determined whether an heir favourable to France or Britain would succeed to the Spanish throne, concluded in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht. In accordance with this treaty, France yielded to Britain its Atlantic possessions of Prince Edward Island (Isle St Jean) and modern-day Nova Scotia except for Cape Breton (Isle Royal), and agreed to abandon all its settlements in Newfoundland. As a consequence, France moved its military and marine headquarters from Plaisance to establish the new, heavily-fortified, royal colony at Louisbourg on Cape Breton. At the same time, migratory French fishermen were still allowed to catch and dry fish along the French Shore as they had for 200 years.
Fifty years later, at the end of the Seven Years’ War and France’s dramatic loss of its vast terrain in New France, France considered its fishing rights so important both for commerce and as a nursery for seamen that it negotiated to regain St Pierre and Miquelon to shelter its fishing fleet and to preserve its migratory fishing privileges along a newlydefined French Shore extending to the west coast of Newfoundland. Twenty years later, the agreement was reiterated after the French-British hostilities during the American Revolutionary War and again in 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars when financial incentives by France led to a flourishing revival of the French fisheries. In 1830, 300 to 400 vessels and 12,000 men arrived from France to fish.
Disagreement in interpretation of these treaties led to political tensions. France maintained that St Pierre and Miquelon had been ceded to it without condition. It claimed exclusive rights to the French Shore, built boats in its harbours, and traded illegally with the remote coastal population. In 1857, a treaty between Britain and France that attempted to regularize fishery practices was denied ratification by the Newfoundland House of Assembly. Tensions were dissipated only in 1904 when the young Prince of Wales who visited Newfoundland in 1860 had become King Edward VII. He used his diplomatic skills to attain a general rapprochement between France and Britain that included a termination of the Treaty of Utrecht with its declaration of the rights of the French fisheries to land on and to use the Newfoundland shore.
When the St John’s asylum opened in 1854, inmates were treated in accordance with the revolutionary theory of moral therapy, the ‘traitement moral’ advocated during the 1790s particularly by Philippe Pinel, a French physician. Influenced by the idea of morality expressed, for example, in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the goodness of the practitioner and his sympathy with those suffering were considered essential along with a knowledge of their specific illness. In an exposition that embraced this theory, Acland wrote a gold-medal winning essay for a course on medical jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in which he provided a taxonomy of mental diseases with observations on the possibility of their treatment. Categories of specific mental illnesses described by Acland included various kinds of melancholia, perceived as a disturbance of the will, the affections, and the understanding; momomanias like suicidal mania, kleptomania, and puerperal (postpartum) mania; dementia, a loss of the perceptive and intellectual faculties; and diseases of the imagination or memory. Moral therapy included the re-direction of patients’ attention through recreation provided by books and music and through manual occupations such as tailoring, baking, and farming. In establishing and administering the asylum, Dr Stabb had worked in conjunction with Dorothea Lynde Dix, an American crusader whom Acland later met at a breakfast in Chicago. Since the 1840s, Miss Dix had campaigned successfully for the establishment of well-heated, airy, brick asylums with tall windows and views of open spaces and rivers. After the disastrous fire that swept St John’s in 1846, leaving 12,000 out of 19,000 homeless, both the asylum and hospital were prudently equipped with ready water supplies to extinguish fires.
At the end of the letters, Acland expands his comments on the asylums in all the Atlantic colonies in “Notes on Medical Arrangements of the Four outer colonies.”
Riverhead Hospital was mostly for the indigent poor; other patients commonly received medical care in their own homes. The hospital had been built largely through public donations in 1814 at the instigation of William Carson, a Scottish physician. Chronically underfunded, in 1860 its maintenance and the appointment of its two physicians, or medical officers, were under the control of the Board of Works, a department responsible for sewage, roads, and bridges established in 1855 at a time when government departments were gradually being created. The low status of nursing in Newfoundland was similar to the status of nursing in England. Because nurses were often illiterate, in 1869 Dr Charles Crowdy, one of its physicians, started night classes so that the staff could read instructions on medicine bottles. In his evaluation of Riverdale Hospital, Dr Acland applied the cardinal principles of sanitation and ventilation meant to counter contagion and bad air, or miasma (Greek: pollution), which were considered the two principal causes of disease.
Acland’s further comments on Riverhead Hospital and other hospitals in the Atlantic colonies are found in “Notes on Medical Arrangements of the Four outer colonies.”
For some time, cod liver oil from the fisheries in Norway and Newfoundland had been included in the materia medica, a medical pharmaceutical list, as beneficial in the treatment of rheumatism and tuberculosis and had more recently become popular as a general strengthener. Advertisements for Mr Archibald’s cod liver oil appeared in The Times in 1860 and his oil was assessed in medical journals like The Lancet for their purity and absence of odour. When Acland was asked for his medical opinion on the chilling process used by Mr Archibald, he refers to stearine, a triglyceride by-product obtained during this process.
In his visit to the Military Hospital, built in 1851, Acland found a sailor removed from the royal squadron with smallpox. Interestingly, in Newfoundland, smallpox vaccination had been introduced very early by a medical missionary, Rev. Dr John Clinch, after its efficacy had been proved in 1798 by his fellow medical student in Britain, Edward Jenner.
The Limerick-born, Roman Catholic bishop, John Mullock, led a flock of Irish Roman Catholics, many of them Gaelic speakers, who in 1860 constituted a majority of the population. The shift in demographics had begun when West Country fishermen trained in the Newfoundland fisheries were diverted into the British navy in times of war or were reluctant to work during successive seasonal failures of the fisheries. Instead, West Country captains recruited labour at ports like Waterford and Cork in southeast Ireland near the transatlantic shipping lanes where they stopped for provisions. What began as a migratory Irish population became a large settler population during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) when the exclusion of the French from the fisheries gave Britain a nearly complete monopoly over the large international fish trade. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, 30,000-35,000 Irish arrived in Newfoundland.
The massive Roman Catholic Cathedral of St John the Baptist was both a reflection of the Irish presence in Newfoundland and an expression of a particular religious stance. The cathedral was realized through contributions from the meagre earnings of people in the outports and St John’s and through their zealous volunteer labour. As construction began, in just two days men, women, and children removed the ground from the excavation site, some women carrying earth in their aprons.
The cathedral’s Romanesque Revival architecture with its rounded Lombard arches was an assertion in stone of the ultramontane stance absorbed during their seminary education at the Irish College in Rome by both Bishop Mullock and his predecessor, Bishop Fleming, who was largely responsible for building the cathedral. These Irish bishops, who had themselves suffered from the suppression of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, sympathized with ultramontane ideas that had originated in France after the devastation of the Roman Catholic Church during the de-christianization of France in the French Revolution. Like some French clergy, they looked over the mountains to Rome (ultra montane: over the mountain) for strong leadership and for its resplendent example in ritual, music, art, and architecture.
Some ultramontane adherents also advocated surveillance of civil legislature and even direct political intervention. Because Newfoundland’s first election in 1832 coincided with its rescinding of a penal law which since 1607 had excluded Roman Catholics in Britain from public office, Roman Catholics were not only able to hold seats in Newfoundland’s legislature but the large Catholic voting population was able to tip the balance away from the Anglican merchant community which until then had held appointed positions of authority. In 1860 Bishop Mullock was at the peak of his power, actively supporting the Liberal Party which espoused the rights of Catholics, Methodists, and the working-class. In 1857 he stirred up the people against the proposed fisheries convention between France and Britain. In 1861 it was deemed that he had done too little to prevent violence when sectarian tensions erupted, Bishop Feild was stoned, and his theological college partly burned.
By the 1830’s, the first Roman Catholic Bishop, Michael Fleming, looked to provide education for the Irish populace. He recruited two religious orders of women from Ireland. The Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a semi-cloistered order founded to educate younger girls, especially the poor, arrived in 1833. The Sisters of Mercy opened a school in 1843 to teach the daughters of the more well-to-do. Because this order was not cloistered, the sisters became known as the “walking nuns” as they walked two by two through St John’s to care for the poor and visit the sick in their homes.
Major Baillie, the commandant of the Royal Engineers, was responsible for maintaining a meteorological register. For the military, weather was important not only for navigation and for military strategy but was also of interest as a possible cause for diseases that ravaged troops. Since 1843, in the United States meteorological observations had been compiled at military posts by officers in the medical department of the army. In the British army, since 1851 officers of the Royal Engineers registered meteorological observations at its military bases around the world. As data from various sources was coordinated, the accuracy of instruments such as the wind guage (anenometer) and the barometer became increasingly important. In 1854, the London firm of Louis Cassella was appointed instrument maker to the Admiralty.
Connections through the university, the Church, the military, the gentry, and through siblings in large families made nineteenth-century England a linked network. In St John’s, Acland remarks that Major Baillie’s wife was also from Devon and had often visited Killerton, the ancestral Acland home. Bishop Feild showed him a treasured gift that he had received from Acland’s oldest brother, Sir Thomas Acland. At the Anglican theological training school, Acland discovered that he had met the principal’s sister in 1857 during his trip with a patient to Madeira where her family was accustomed to housing distinguished visitors on their large, vine-growing estate. Captain Orlebar had been a mess-mate of a mutual friend at the British garrison in Seringapatam in South India. Dr Stabb, resident physician at the asylum, was also from Devon and had attended medical school in Edinburgh just a few years before Acland.