Trepassey

Trepassey is a harbour and a community on Trepassey Bay, at the south-eastern corner of the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland. The inlet is described as long and sheltered, the feature that made it valuable to the migratory cod fishery. Beyond it lies the open Atlantic and the headlands that gave this coast its reputation for wrecks. No fort, no garrison, no governor, no chartered town.¹

What the place had was fish, and water calm enough to work them in. A harbour full of shipping and stores, with nothing in it to shoot back, is a target.

A station of the cod fishery

Trepassey grew instead of being founded. Successive European fishing nations used the southern Avalon as a seasonal station, and Jacques Cartier is recorded passing through the area in 1536; French, Spanish and Portuguese fishermen worked the coast across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early English attempts at settlement failed, and it was a French settlement that took hold at the harbour in the later seventeenth century. In 1702, during the War of the Spanish Succession, a raid under Commodore John Leake is said to have expelled the French, and the place was drawn firmly into the English West Country fishery.²

Its function through the Golden Age was economic. Each summer the population swelled with migratory fishermen, bankers and servants out of the English West Country and out of Ireland, and each winter it contracted again; only by the 1770s did permanent residents come to outnumber the seasonal ones. Merchant-planter firms based in the South Devon ports of Topsham and Exeter dominated the trade and exercised considerable informal judicial and administrative authority over the people in the harbour. The shore carried the machinery of the trade, the wooden stages, flakes and stores on which the catch was landed, split, salted and dried.³

Who held authority

Authority rested with the fishing admirals of each season and, increasingly, with the resident merchant-planters and the Devon firms behind them. Below a thin layer of principal inhabitants stood the planters, boat-keepers, migratory fishermen and indentured servants who did the work. The divisions were described as ones of class, not of nationality. Leake's business at the harbour in 1702 was imperial, not local government.

Trepassey was a cod station, and the surviving descriptions of its labour force name West Country and Irish migratory fishermen, servants and boat-keepers. None of them shows the harbour working as a node of the Atlantic slave trade. The labour system was one of European servitude and wage fishing.

Black colours in the harbour

In June 1720, on a date given as about the twenty-first by later writers and as the last of the month by the General History, Bartholomew Roberts brought a small captured sloop into the crowded anchorage. She goes unnamed in the earliest account, and the Fortune of the secondary works was probably the French prize taken afterwards. A General History of the Pyrates, printed in 1724 and attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, has the pirates entering "with their black colours flying, drums beating, and trumpets sounding". One small sloop sailed openly into a harbour holding a season's worth of shipping, and the shipping gave way.⁴

The same book supplies the scene. It states that there were "two and twenty vessels in the harbour, which the men all quitted upon the sight of the pirate, and fled ashore", and that the pirates then set about "burning and sinking all the shipping, except a Bristol galley, and destroying the fisheries, and stages of the poor planters, without remorse or compunction". Most retellings since work from that paragraph.⁵

The Bristol galley

Roberts kept the galley he had spared. He manned her, mounted sixteen guns on her by the 1724 account, eighteen by Moses Renos's sworn deposition, and made her his flagship, which took him from a small sloop to a galley-built ship. The 1724 text stops there and gives her no new name. The identification of this vessel as the ship Roberts renamed the Royal Fortune turns up in hobbyist secondary accounts, and the primary text contradicts it.⁶

The count that will not settle

How much Roberts actually destroyed is unsettled. The earliest figure is Johnson's twenty-two vessels. A later tradition adds roughly 150 fishing boats or shallops, a number nowhere in the 1724 passage. Later writers state that Roberts found as many as 172 merchant and fishing craft at anchor and burned twenty-two of them, which the General History does not support. Roberts entered, the crews fled, a Bristol galley became his flagship, and real damage was done to shipping and to the planters' works. The tally is not established.⁷

After the raid

The episode mattered for its nerve rather than its tonnage. It fixed Roberts's reputation for recklessness about a year after his election to command, and it upgraded his force. Off the Newfoundland banks in the weeks that followed he is said to have taken a run of French vessels, one refitted with heavier armament and renamed the Fortune, called the Good Fortune only in a secondary account. From there runs the campaign that made him the era's most prolific captor and ended off Cape Lopez in February 1722, at the close of the Golden Age.

Trepassey survived and went on fishing. The trade declined late in the eighteenth century, with St John's displacing Topsham as commercial overseer and many English residents leaving. There is no ruined fort to visit, because no fort belongs to this part of its story. The heritage here is the harbour and the shore stations, and the raid survives in the telling rather than in anything dug out of the ground.

What the sources cannot yet give is the arithmetic. Twenty-two vessels, 150 boats and 172 craft cannot be reconciled, and the date of about 21 June 1720 rests on secondary datings rather than a dated despatch; the Board of Trade Newfoundland correspondence in CO 194 and the Admiralty station reports, which would settle both, remain unread. The early growth of the fishing station is set down as the Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador account gives it, and has still to be read against a colonial despatch.