he winter, Placentia is a protected harbor,
open all the year round, and having a sheltered waterway navigable for
the largest ships to the northernmost and narrowest part of the
Isthmus of Avalon.

We must believe that the French would have managed Newfoundland better
than the English if they had kept the island; for the men who cut the
Isthmus of Suez would surely long ago have made a passage, three miles
long, by which the ships of Trinity Bay might have found their way at
the close of autumn to the safe winter harbors of the southern coast.

All along the southern shore the names on the map tell us of French
occupation.

Port aux Basques, Harbor Breton, Rencontre Bay (called by the English
Round Counter), Cape La Hune, Bay d'Espoir, are but a few of them.

The name which the English have given to this last is strangely
characteristic. The Bay of Hope (Baie d'Espoir) of the French has been
changed into the Bay of Despair of the English. It was really a Bay of
Hope to the French; for from the head of one of its fiords, deep
enough for the largest of our modern ships, an Indian trail goes
northwards in less than 100 miles to the fertile valley of the
Exploits River. Can we suppose that the French engineers would have
allowed 200 years to elapse without building a road along this trail?
And yet not a single road was built by the English conquerors before
the year 1825; and even to-day, to reach the point where the Indian
trail crosses the Exploits, we must travel 260 miles by rail from
Placentia or St. John's instead of 100 from Bay d'Espoir, simply
because the English holders of property in St. John's, like dogs in
the manger, will not permit any improvement in the country, unless it
can be made tributary to their special interests.

That the English were worse enemies of Newfoundland than the French,
even in King Charles's time, may be seen from the advice given by Sir
Josiah Child, the chairman of that great monopoly, the East India
Company, that the island "was to have no government, nor inhabitants
permitted to reside at Newfoundland, nor any passengers or private
boat-keepers permitted to fish at Newfoundland."

The Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations adopted the
suggestion of Sir Josiah; and in 1676, just a century before the
American Declaration of Independence, the west country adventurers
began to drive away the resident inhabitants, and to take possession
of their houses and fishing stages