Beating against the Wind: Popular Opposition to Bishop Feild and Tractarianism in Newfoundland and Labrador 9780773599000

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Maps
Introduction
1 Tractarianism and Bishop Edward Feild
2 St John’s: “These Ignorant and Excited Fishmongers”
3 Conception Bay: An “Encroaching People”
4 Northeast Coast: A People “Possessed with a Feeling of Their Own Importance”
5 Labrador: A People of “Unhappy Variance”
6 Placentia Bay: A People with “a Vigorous Self-Activating Culture”
7 South Coast: A People “Attending the Church Service and the Worship of the Methodists Indiscriminately”
8 The Western Shore and the West Coast: A People Who “Do Just as They Please”
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y

Citation preview

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beating against the wind

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mcgill-queen’s studies in the history of religion Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto.

series one g.a. rawlyk, editor 1

Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815– 1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson

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Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of NineteenthCentury Ontario William Westfall

3

An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die

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The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley

11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Edited by Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States Edited by George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall

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The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau

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The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer

16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar

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A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright

17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis P. Travis Kroeker

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Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

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A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook

10 God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson

20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 Brian J. Fraser

Preface 21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau 23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen

24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827– 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanne Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

series two in memory of george rawlyk donald harman akenson, editor 1 Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson

9 The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

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Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk

10 Gentle Eminence A Life of Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt

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Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill

11 Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan

4 The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Edited by Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk 5 Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna 6

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The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston

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12 Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene 13 Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer 14 Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William H. Katerberg 15 The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery 16 Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel Paul Charles Merkley

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17 A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley 18 Households of Faith Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 Edited by Nancy Christie 19 Blood Ground Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 Elizabeth Elbourne 20 A History of Canadian Catholics Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism Terence J. Fay 21 The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question Edited and translated by John Zucchi 22 The Founding Moment Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College William Westfall 23 The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches Haim Genizi 24 Governing Charities Church and State in Toronto‘s Catholic Archdiocese, 1850–1950 Paula Maurutto 25 Anglicans and the Atlantic World High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection Richard W. Vaudry 26 Evangelicals and the Continental Divide The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States Sam Reimer 27 Christians in a Secular World The Canadian Experience Kurt Bowen 28 Anatomy of a Seance A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada Stan McMullin

29 With Skilful Hand The Story of King David David T. Barnard 30 Faithful Intellect Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University Neil Semple 31 W. Stanford Reid An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy Donald MacLeod 32 A Long Eclipse The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 Catherine Gidney 33 Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 1787–1858 Kyla Madden 34 For Canada’s Sake Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s Gary R. Miedema 35 Revival in the City The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 Eric R. Crouse 36 The Lord for the Body Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930 James Opp 37 Six Hundred Years of Reform Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789 J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields 38 The Missionary Oblate Sisters Vision and Mission Rosa Bruno-Jofré 39 Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada The Colbys of Carrollcroft Marguerite Van Die 40 Michael Power The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier Mark G. McGowan

Preface 41 The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 Michael Gauvreau 42 Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700 Patricia Simpson 43 To Heal a Fractured World The Ethics of Responsibility Jonathan Sacks 44 Revivalists Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 Kevin Kee 45 The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Canada Edited by Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert 46 Political Ecumenism Catholics, Jews, and Protestants in De Gaulle’s Free France, 1940–1945 Geoffrey Adams 47 From Quaker to Upper Canadian Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 Robynne Rogers Healey 48 The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796 Colleen Gray 49 Canadian Pentecostalism Transition and Transformation Edited by Michael Wilkinson 50 A War with a Silver Lining Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 Gordon L. Heath 51 In the Aftermath of Catastrophe Founding Judaism, 70 to 640 Jacob Neusner 52 Imagining Holiness Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times Justin Jaron Lewis 53 Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874 Calvin Hollett

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54 Into Deep Waters Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinist Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855 Daniel C. Goodwin 55 Vanguard of the New Age The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891–1945 Gillian McCann 56 A Commerce of Taste Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914 Barry Magrill 57 The Big Picture The Antigonish Movement of Eastern Nova Scotia Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta 58 My Heart’s Best Wishes for You A Biography of Archbishop John Walsh John P. Comiskey 59 The Covenanters in Canada Reformed Presbyterianism from 1820 to 2012 Eldon Hay 60 The Guardianship of Best Interests Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850–1960 Renée N. Lafferty 61 In Defence of the Faith Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Brazilian Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline James E. Wadsworth 62 Contesting the Moral High Ground Popular Moralists in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain Paul T. Phillips 63 The Catholicisms of Coutances Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789 J. Michael Hayden 64 After Evangelicalism The Sixties and the United Church of Canada Kevin N. Flatt 65 The Return of Ancestral Gods Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation Mariya Lesiv

vi 66 Transatlantic Methodists British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec Todd Webb 67 A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 68 Fighting over God A Legal and Political History of Religious Freedom in Canada Janet Epp Buckingham 69 From India to Israel Identity, Immigration, and the Struggle for Religious Equality Joseph Hodes 70 Becoming Holy in Early Canada Timothy Pearson 71 The Cistercian Arts From the 12th to the 21st Century Edited by Terryl N. Kinder and Roberto Cassanelli

Preface 72 The Canny Scot Archbishop James Morrison of Antigonish Peter Ludlow 73 Religion and Greater Ireland Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1950 Edited by Colin Barr and Hilary M. Carey 74 The Invisible Irish Finding Protestants in the NineteenthCentury Migrations to America Rankin Sherling 75 Beating against the Wind Popular Opposition to Bishop Feild and Tractarianism in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1844–1876 Calvin Hollett

Preface

Beating against the Wind Popular Opposition to Bishop Feild and Tractarianism in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1844–1876

calvin hollet t

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 isbn 978-0-7735-4735-3 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4736-0 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-9900-0 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-9901-7 (epub)

Legal deposit second quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Hollett, Calvin, 1952-, author Beating against the wind : popular opposition to bishop Field and tractarianism in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1844-1876 / Calvin Hollett. (McGill-Queen's studies in the history of religion. Series two ; 75) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4735-3 (cloth). – isbn 978-0-7735-4736-0 (paper). – isbn 978-0-7735-9900-0 (pdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-9901-7 (epub) 1. Feild, Edward, 1801–1876. 2. Bishops – Newfoundland and Labrador – Biography. 3. Church of England – Bishops – Biography. 4. Church of England – Newfoundland and Labrador – History – 19th century. 5. Oxford movement – Newfoundland and Labrador – History – 19th century. 6. Newfoundland and Labrador – Religion – 19th century. 7. Newfoundland and Labrador – Biography. I. Title. II. Series: McGill-Queen's studies in the history of religion. Series two ; 75

bx5640.f5h64 2016

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c2015-908570-5 c2015-908571-3

This book was set by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

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To my parents, Susan and Llewellyn Hollett

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Contents

Illustrations

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Acknowledgments Preface Maps

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Introduction

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1 Tractarianism and Bishop Edward Feild

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2 St John’s: “These Ignorant and Excited Fishmongers” 50 3 Conception Bay: An “Encroaching People” 75 4 Northeast Coast: A People “Possessed with a Feeling of Their Own Importance” 99 5 Labrador: A People of “Unhappy Variance” 149 6 Placentia Bay: A People with “a Vigorous Self-Activating Culture” 178 7 South Coast: A People “Attending the Church Service and the Worship of the Methodists Indiscriminately” 228 8 The Western Shore and the West Coast: A People Who “Do Just as They Please” 263 Conclusion Notes

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Bibliography 379 Index

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Illustrations

0.1 Bishop Fleming’s cathedral (Holloway, Through Newfoundland with the Camera, 25) 7 0.2 Bishop Feild’s cathedral (spg Quarterly Paper, October 1856) 0.3 The Hawk (The Net Cast in Many Waters, 1870, 90) 0.4 A journal of Bishop Feild

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1.1 Heart’s Content, from the deck of the Great Eastern (Illustrated London News, 8 September 1866) 30 1.2 Aquaforte, from a William Grey sketch (Gospel Missionary, 1865, 163) 39 1.3 A fisherman’s room (Graphic, 19 December 1874)

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2.1 British and Foreign Bible Society publication, 1813

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2.2 In St John’s Harbour for supplies (McGrath, Newfoundland in 1911, 241) 72 3.1 Wreck of the Wolf (Graphic, 18 April 1896)

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4.1 Fishing fleet bound for Labrador (Holloway, Through Newfoundland with the Camera, 1910, 117) 109 4.2 Making fish (Christian Herald, 25 July 1917) 119 4.3 Exploits (Holloway, Through Newfoundland with the Camera, 1905, 62) 126 5.1 Church at Forteau (Gospel Missionary, 1852, 19)

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5.2 Bonne Esperance fishing room (Holloway, Through Newfoundland with the Camera, 1905, 125) 174

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6.1 Collett’s Church of England in Newfoundland 203 6.2 A winterhouse (Gospel Missionary, 1855, 136)

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7.1 Great Burin (Holloway, Through Newfoundland with the Camera, 1905, 72) 237 7.2 Cape Ray (Illustrated London News, 20 October 1855)

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7.3 Thomas Newman Hunt’s stone church at Hermitage (Prowse, History of Newfoundland, supplement, 21) 255 8.1 Death of Thomas Boland (Gospel Missionary, 1884, 40)

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8.2 Bonne Bay (Holloway, Through Newfoundland with the Camera, 1905, 105) 289

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply appreciative of the indispensable encouragement and support of many for this work. I am thankful for my parents, Susan and Llewellyn Hollett, who were constant in their support and confidence. I thank God; my wife, Myrna, for her belief in the project; my son Mark for many discussions on architecture; my son Peter for editorial suggestions; my daughter, Heather; and my brothers and sisters, especially Derek. I am also grateful to a number of friends: Joy and Louis Best for countless suppers and even more love; Roger and Donna Down; Cliff and Cathy Peck; Marion Forsey, for help beyond help; Martin and Anne Mack; Daryl and Pamela Hollett; Don and Fay Rideout; Rob and Heather Barbour; Dona Bulgin; Robert Forsey; Isabelle Hall; Karen and Andy Vaters; Donna and Gary House; Pauline Thomas; Shauna and Phil Matthews; and Brian and Luanne Shaw. I owe a debt of gratitude to Brian, with whom I have discussed this material over countless nighttime coffees. It is Brian I thank also for originating the title of the book on one such occasion after three or four sips. The staff at McGill-Queen’s have been very helpful – especially James MacNevin, acquisitions editor, and Ian MacKenzie, copy editor. I also thank Jacqui Davis, publicist; Jennifer Roberts, in marketing; Ryan Van Huijstee, managing editor; Philip Cercone, executive director; and the many staff who have worked on this book whom I have not corresponded with personally. And in that latter category also, the peer reviewers whose insights have contributed to its improvement. I thank the history department at Memorial University for fostering my growth in historical research and writing, especially, at the time, Christopher English, Lewis Fischer, Shannon Ryan, Linda Kealey, Sean Cadigan, and William Reeves; Jeff Webb, who enabled me to make my first steps, for his continuing interest and help, lately in accessing university theses; Kurt Korneski, for many insightful discussions and help in accessing books. And

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Fran Warren, who made it all happen. I thank Hans Rollmann for engaging discussions, and Patrick O’Flaherty. I also thank the Graduate Studies Department. Chapter 6 began as an ma thesis at Memorial University – I thank James Hillier, my supervisor, who expertly and promptly supervised that work as I cut my teeth in historical method. He also generously read over an early version of the present manuscript and offered valuable suggestions. I feel much gratitude to Regent College, Vancouver, for enabling me to study theology in a disciplined way, especially for, at the time, Carl Armerding, Ian S. Rennie, John Howard Yoder, Bruce Waltke, Larry Hurtado, Clark Pinnock, F.F. Bruce, John Stott, and, more recently, David Hempton. I thank Linda White for her avid interest and for giving me her draft manuscript of the Robert Dyer diary; David Mercer; Ron Hoddinott and Gary Murrin at Livyers Antiques for finding me a couple of rare books on Conception Bay; Graham Skanes at the Newfoundland Bookfinder for finding rare visitation journals of Bishop Feild; Leslie Dean for his engaging conversations on Methodists; the Collett family for a rich collection of primary sources. And, of course, the wonderful people at archives and libraries: Joan Ritcey, Deborah Andrews, Glenda Dawe, Colleen Field, Jackie Hillier, Carl White, Jane Deal, Donna Doucette, Lorraine Cleary, Susan Hadley, Deanna Matthews, and Sharon Thompson at the Centre for Newfoundland Studies; Bert Riggs, Linda White, Debbie Edgecombe, Colleen Quigley, and Gloria O’Leary at mun Archives and Special Collections; Susan Foley at Queen’s College; Bernice Bussey, Andrew Davis, and Allison Piercey at the Newfoundland and Labrador Conference Archives of the United Church of Canada; Larry Dohey, while at the Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St John’s; Julia Mathieson while at the Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador Archives and the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist’s Archives; Melanie Tucker, Charles Young, and Emily Gushue at the Rooms Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador; Susan St. Onge, Rose Price, Sharon Blandford, Tina Murphy, Pam Soucy, and Michelle Stuckless at the Gander Public Library for interlibrary book loans; Susannah Rayner, Joanne Ichimura, Lance Martin, and Felicity Croydon at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Peter Nockles at John Rylands Library, University of Manchester; Lucy McCann, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the staff of the British Library and Guildhall Library, London, and the Local History Centre, Poole; Marion Hyde of the Gospel Standard Baptist Library of Hove, East Sussex, England, for scans of John Roberts, Glorious Title.

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I thank Newfoundland Studies for permission to reprint much of “Evangelicals vs. Tractarians: Resistance to Bishop Feild at Harbour Buffett, Placentia Bay, 1849–1854,” Newfoundland Studies 18, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 245–78, and “The Founding of Harbour Buffett, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, 1836–1846: A Popular Initiative in Religion and Education,” Newfoundland Studies 24, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 199–217. Finally, I thank the sshrc for its Aid to Scholarly Publications Program grant toward the publication of this work.

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There are multiple studies of Tractarianism, its theology, ethos, and liturgy, but how did the movement fare in the colonies? This study focuses on its reception when it was brought across the North Atlantic by Bishop Edward Feild to Newfoundland and Labrador on the eastern edge of North America, the nearest colony in the empire. Crashing against the shore and expending itself on the formidable rock along its coast, its arrival is not at all the story of conquest that has been purported in the institutional record. The phalanx of popular Protestantism – evangelical Anglican, Methodist, and to a much lesser degree, Congregationalist – that greeted the wave of solemnity, largely dispersed its energy and received only the effects of its spray. This popular history shows a people who were as independent in their spirituality as they were in contending with the forces of nature by which they wrested a living from the land, sea, and ice. A migratory coastal people, living by fishing and sealing in the North Atlantic, exulting in their newfound freedom from squire and parson, they took responsibility for their spirituality, as they did for everything else in their lives. Accustomed to an independent and democratic exercise of religion with portable Bible and Prayer Book, tracts, testimony, and song, on a coast where the sighting of a clergyman was as rare as the sighting of a cardinal, they did not at all take to the new hierarchical experiment in religion known as Tractarianism. They were undaunted by the episcopal ephemera that Bishop Feild displayed while travelling the coastal frontier. Not open to a renewed imposition of church authority through hieratic sacramental veneration, they rejected the attempt to dispossess them of their spirituality by interposing a priest between them and their God. With their demotic piety they opposed the effort to wrestle the sacred from their grasp and place it in a chancel. Rejecting the impulse of ecclesiastical colonization, they let their own

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voices ring out as they worshipped, prayed and testified in the forest in fall and winter, on the ice in spring and on the sea in summer, and negotiated their spirituality when they occasionally found themselves in Gothic spaces inhabited by clergymen sympathetic to the bishop. Thus Bishop Feild had to continually beat against the wind as he unremittingly visited the harbours and bays of Newfoundland and Labrador. Bishop Feild did leave a Gothic footprint in a few harbours along the coast. These structures and habits of awe stand out for the novelty that they are, and these vestigial remains have provided the main evidence for a historical record that has claimed success for the movement. However it is a focus on the Gothic apparatus and its attendants, not on the people themselves. Distracted with bishop, clergy, chancels and arches, it has not paid attention to nineteenth-century popular spirituality in the harbours and bays of Newfoundland and Labrador. The Tractarian wave was formidable but so was the Protestantism that gave it its opposition. It is the clash of the two which enables one to view popular spiritual values as people rejected the elitist onslaught or negotiated their way through the turbulence, incorporating elements of the reimagined Anglicanism into their spiritual universe over time.

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Introduction

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Introduction At nine o’clock we were beating into the Narrows, and by half-past nine were safely anchored in St John’s Harbour … I remained on board, having no house or home on shore, and well content with my Church ship … I returned to my cabin in the evening, and continued to occupy it all alone, and to sleep every night on board till the festival of St Simon and Jude, October 28th. The good Church ship was then laid up for the winter. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1848, 119–20

In May 1845 Bishop Feild visited Brigus in Conception Bay and “solemnly” consecrated the new church, billed at the time as “a beautiful Gothic building.” Of special note in the contemporary clerical record were its “Eastern windows … filled with stained glass” and its “beautiful altarpiece.”1 But it appears that not everyone in the settlement beheld the arrival of the new Anglicanism with such wonder. What happened a few years later in Brigus was the most demonstrative reaction on record in Newfoundland and Labrador to Tractarian changes in the internal architecture of a church. A tradition in the Bartlett family states that one of its members in “about 1860” decided that he had had enough and was not going to take it anymore. Captain Abram Bartlett, of the sealing vessel Panther fame, “marched up to the chancel … and ‘shipped out’ the altar, throwing down the candlesticks, cross, and other articles that he felt were ritualistic paraphernalia, after which he withdrew from the church and turned over to the Methodists.”2 Many are the books on the ideology of Tractarianism, not the least of which are the fine analyses of Church, Chadwick, Nockles, Turner, and Pereiro.3 This study in popular religion will focus on the reception of Tractarianism as it strikes the shore in Newfoundland and Labrador. As a social history it is a study of the popular response in that most easterly part of North America to the romantic spirituality brewed across the water within Oriel College especially, and so identified with the clerical professors of

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Oxford as they reimagined the Church of England in reaction to rationalism and liberalism and evangelicalism, that it acquired the Oxford Movement as one of its names. It is remarkable that the waves from a college movement would reach across the Atlantic, but they certainly did, and beyond it. For the coastal people of Newfoundland and Labrador they arrived with Edward Feild (1801–76) of Worcester, appointed bishop of Newfoundland and Bermuda and sent out to the colony in 1844. How the Protestant population reacted to the bishop with the novel ideas is the focus of this book.4 It is a study of popular resistance to Bishop Feild and portrays the prelate from the point of view of the people who thirsted for freedom in the face of a hierarchical imposition of religiosity. It aims to place the people themselves in the forefront as it explores those who opposed him and why, and it portrays the conflict from their perspective as they negotiated their own spirituality. As they saw it, Feild was endeavouring to dispossess, certainly disrupt, them with his Tractarianism and his episcopal regimen issuing directly from it. Their Protestantism was an egalitarian impulse, for it freed them and empowered them to think and speak as individuals, and to take charge of their spirituality and church affairs. As Frank Turner has noted, evangelicals “determined to furnish the laity with religious language and theological concepts that might be discussed in an open, public manner, not reserved to a secluded sacred space or closed priesthood … The evangelicals thus democratized religion and in democratizing it made religion something about which Christians through the exercise of their private judgements could reason, debate, and choose.”5 Tractarianism in contrast was a reassertion of hierarchical ideology by which Bishop Feild attempted to silence the voice of others in religion and elevate himself and his clergy, and thereby assert “the old clerical rule over the laity,” as ultramontanism attempted in Roman Catholicism. Feild arrived when liberal democratic values were coming to the surface in politics in Newfoundland, as they were in the England from which he came. Feild’s reaction was clear: “The farce of Responsible Government is to be enacted or represented here as in other North American Colonies.”6 The case is therefore made that the people in opposing Feild were fighting an ideology that they perceived, if successful, would have a retrograde effect on Newfoundland society. It is a narrative of the common man fighting elite control, of the democratic impulse versus autocracy, of colonies versus colonizer, and it claims that people did exercise an agency that was essentially successful. It was an actual conflict, with gritty detail, as conflicts are, but thus far it has been written chiefly from the top down, largely hagiographic, with the conflict generally papered over in the interest of the institution. What hangs in the

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balance in historical writing is whose voice gets to be heard, and consequently who makes history. This history is from the bottom up, in contrast to the clerical record where the people’s voice was generally ignored in the interests of that hierarchy. When conflict had to be addressed in clerical writing, certainly in Feild, the people involved were written up as ignorant, irresponsible, thankless, and, in the end, unsuccessful. I make a case that there was popular agency for a measure of freedom and democracy in people’s spiritual lives – and by extension in the rest of their lives, that people felt they had a right to make it, and that Feild, as a theological and ecclesiastical colonizer, and many of his clergy, attempted to quash it. This agency, often ignored, is a quintessential aspect of the social history and culture of the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.7 There is some repetition in the tenets of Tractarianism and evangelicalism in this work, but as a popular study the repetition is nuanced according to its geographical focus on bays and communities. If it were another top-down study of Feild or treatise on Tractarianism, the repetition would be redundant. But as it examines the issues from a local perspective instead of solely from that of the bishop, it gives an intimate knowledge of localities and individuals. This geographical approach requires restatement and gives the volume its structure. For instance, the rush of many Anglicans from Tractarianism to Methodism at Twillingate was very different from the more passive resistance of Anglicans at Barr’d Islands and Joe Batt’s Arm, most of whom remained at St James Church. Detail and nuance is the essence of local studies to see what is actually happening locally. One cannot do popular history without it. In this specific work, the local focus is particularly helpful in illuminating the response of a people aspiring for more personal and political freedom in the face of the implementation of a hierarchical ecclesiastical system. Of the local history presented, the study of what happened in Harbour Buffett is the most detailed of all. It is an attempt to study the local situation as closely as possible through such sources as letters, pamphlets, and newspapers. It shows that the opposition there was not of one individual, “the Collett Case,” as Frederick Jones described it in his top-down study, but was instead “the Harbour Buffett case.” Moreover, the people resisted without the leadership of an evangelical clergyman, unlike the situation at St Paul’s in Harbour Grace and at St Thomas’s in St John’s. Instead of just Collett resisting Bishop Feild, nearly the whole community did. What was happening there, to use E.P. Thompson’s words, was “a vigorous self-activating culture of the people” that was “resistant to any form of external domination,” or at least to the form of Tractarian domination that they perceived Bishop Feild was attempting to impose upon them through his clergyman,

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William Kepple White.8 Furthermore, its being noised abroad through pamphlets and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic shows that this micro-narrative is not “the miserable chronicle of an obscure village,” but instead reveals the values of society and institutional structures in a transatlantic world. Here I attempt to write a narrative that is “thick enough,” to quote Peter Burke, “to deal not only with the sequence of events and the conscious intentions of the actors in these events, but also with structures – institutions, modes of thought, and so on – whether these structures act as a brake on events or as an accelerator.” Everyday life that was “once dismissed as trivial” by historians is now widely viewed as “the centre to which everything else must be related.”9 Popular history is a challenge because, in this instance, the primary sources written by clergy predominate, and their interests and views are given priority and privilege in the historical record. The Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), for example, was initiated to proclaim more loudly the right and necessity of episcopacy, in addition to missionaries, in the colonies. In fact, it touted as a maxim that where there were no colonial bishops there was no Church of England. In its first issue it clarified that the periodical was not just another avenue of information for missionaries and the “sixteen Colonial Bishoprics” already founded, but that it was “intended to aim at the formation in the public mind of a more decided and earnest spirit of sympathy” with work that was already under way. It so ardently believed in bishops that its profits were “devoted to the Fund for the Endowment of New Bishoprics in the Colonies.”10 Thus, one does not expect the periodical to detract from Bishop Feild or his episcopal mission. Though he was a late arrival, it went so far as to designate him “the founder” of the Church of England in Newfoundland and Labrador.11 But even more so, the historical corpus is predominantly the letters and journals, often for publication, of the clergy themselves, and thus weighted with their clerical perspective. To gain an understanding of how their actions and views were received by the people as they negotiated their spirituality, which is the book’s focus, one has to also read the correspondence between the lines and against the grain. Contemporary controversy is also helpful, for it lays bare the clerical rhetoric as a heaving sea does a sunker. There is a similar challenge, of course, in the study of Roman Catholicism. While there was little crossover between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Newfoundland and Labrador, and this book is focused on the former, it is worth asking why the latter may have succumbed to the intense sacramental focus of Bishop Fleming’s ultramontanism, while Protestants did not fall in with Feild’s Tractarianism. John FitzGerald found that Bishop Anthony Fleming transformed “trustee-run, Irish provincial faction-

Introduction

7

0.1 Bishop Fleming’s cathedral

ridden, informal, popular Catholicism to institutionalized, ultramontane Catholicism.” He was able to do this because the Irish, gasping in a British Protestant hegemony, were eager to assert themselves as equals. Fleming provided a new avenue of Irish identity and power focused on the institutional church through Presentation Sisters education, sacramentalism, and architectural monumentalism. He expelled lay trustees from the ecclesiastical sphere and supported a focus on political reform. FitzGerald claimed that in this way the church became the cultural broker of Irish ethnicity, hence Bishop Fleming’s success, amply demonstrated by his cathedral dominating the harbour and by the Catholic education provided by the Presentation Sisters. Yet, instead of a transformation, it seems that ultramontanism was simply an addition to Irish culture and Catholicism. FitzGerald later states that “factional disorder and faction-fighting, provincial rivalries, secret societies, popular traditions, songs, legends, mock funerals, processions, holy wells, and myths were intensely local experiences and abounded in Irish Newfoundland. They were in a continuum with the cultural customs and tools used by Fleming and the reformers, which included ultramontanism to reform the church.”12 No doubt an addition to a culture would be not so much a challenge as a displacement, as Tractarianism would have been in Protestant Anglicanism. However, FitzGerald’s is not a study of popular religion, but is an inquiry into clerical power asserting institutional control and into lay political reform, specifically in St John’s.

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Beating against the Wind

Carolyn Lambert, in her exploration of Roman Catholicism in St John’s, largely post-Fleming, noted, significantly, that it was the Catholic lower class who funded the cathedral with the working poor donating “a penny a week,” and the fishermen and sealers donating fish, pelts, or cash. This would certainly indicate a popular identification with the project itself. She also agreed that the “larger purpose” of the ultramontane Fleming in education was “to integrate Catholic children and their parents fully into the religious and social structure of the Church.” Still, it is questionable how successful he was in transforming popular religion in this way. For instance, enrolment was “chronically low.” While part of the reason was class, such as child labour and lack of suitable clothes, it was also “the result of parental choice and attitudes,” articulated in the contemporary record as “‘the singular apathy of parents generally.’” This would certainly indicate indifference not only to writing and arithmetic, but also to the bishop’s alternate spiritual universe.13 We have few “intensely local” studies of popular Roman Catholicism to determine how successful Fleming was in transforming Irish culture with ultramontanism, or even in welding it onto the former. Willeen Keough pushes the door on popular religion wide open in her study of Irish women on the Southern Avalon. She saw an “encroachment of ultramontanism” upon female power, for instance, in priests attempting to exclusively perform baptism. However, midwives and other women continued to baptize infants “to tide them over” before Fleming’s priests arrived. Women also figured large in “an alternate pre-Christian religious system” that blended with Catholicism, such as the protection of children from fairies and ritualistic wailing at funerals. She agreed that ultramontanist priests set out “to discourage popular supernaturalism because it threatened their ambitions for a monopoly of mediation of the supernatural world.”14 Yet despite the clerical effort, women “persevered” in “their customary practices in concert with formal religion.” In conclusion, while ultramontanism may have transformed Roman Catholicism in Newfoundland at an institution level, there was little or no change in many aspects of popular religion or Irish identity. There are already two detailed biographies of Feild, one written by a contemporary and the other a PhD thesis, and both commend him highly for his achievements. H.W. Tucker’s nineteenth-century hagiography of Feild, a man “unwarped and uninfluenced by a single selfish thought,” laid out a chronological account of his life, work, and accomplishments, and is also valuable for the bishop’s many transcribed letters. He particularly highlighted Feild’s uncommon ability as an administrator, combined with his stamina and singleness of purpose, to bring into reality his institutional

Introduction

9

vision for the church. Feild took over Bishop Spencer’s idea of a cathedral and built “the most imposing specimen of pointed architecture on that side of the Atlantic.” Similarly, he took his predecessor’s “skeleton” seminary and established in its place “a suitable College” and raised an endowment for it. He enlarged local revenue for the church by instituting a “system” of collecting through the “machinery” of the Church Society, established a Widow’s and Orphan’s Fund for clergy, built two orphanages, and raised an endowment for the see itself. Tucker’s assessment echoed Feild’s “six outstanding accomplishments” that buttressed the church, as noted at the time of his last public appearance in St John’s in 1875: college, academies, orphanages, cathedral, coadjutor bishopric, and endowments – and after fighting for it all his life, he finally succeeded in instituting denominational education. Twenty years later, William Pilot, the Anglican superintendent, concluded that while all before him did their part, it was with “the Apostolic Bishop Feild, that the progress of the Church in Newfoundland will ever be closely associated.” Elinor Senior, in her dcb entry, likewise concluded it was in administration that Feild made his greatest contribution to the church in Newfoundland. Because of these achievements, Gordon Winter, former lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland, could make the assessment a century later that Bishop Feild was “a great man … Monuments that attest to this are to be seen all around us.” Tucker determined that Feild was successful as an administrator in these and other endeavours largely because he steered clear of the recent phenomenon of “a vulgar and idolatrous worship of majorities.” Rather, because of his strength of character, courage, and determination he was undaunted by “unpopularity” but instead “never yielded or withdrew from any position which he had deemed it his duty to assume.”15 Frederick Jones completed the other major biography of Bishop Feild as a 1971 doctoral dissertation. It and his several journal articles, a prodigious output on the bishop, focus particularly on Feild’s rather rocky engagement of political power to further his educational ideal. In his sympathetic study Jones’s aim was “to rediscover the forgotten bishop,” paying particular attention to his involvement in politics. Yet Jones is vague in his assessment of Feild’s accomplishments in that arena, merely saying that there were many changes during his episcopate and that Feild’s contribution was “no less important because at times unwitting.” Feild did finally obtain denominational education, but his political engagement resulted in his being “stoned in the streets” and the governor feeling great relief in 1861 when Feild left St John’s for his visitation around the coast. While ecclesiastical affairs were not the focus of his study, Jones, like writers before him, did assess that his diocese “had benefited greatly in matters of organization,” and

10

Beating against the Wind

noted the landmarks of institutional progress to which they had adverted. He ended his thesis with a tribute of a successor: “Bishop Feild … who completed the consolidation of the Church of Newfoundland, still towers above its Bishops and inspires them and their clergy and people,” and with an obituary that ruminated on his being “a saint.”16 Overlooking his religious and cultural impact on society, the study of Bishop Feild has centred on his role in politics. Scholars especially focused on his being drawn into politics through his dogged campaign for subdivision of the Protestant education grant to obtain a portion “under direction of the members of our Church only,” and how this played out politically in the impetus for responsible government.17 The Newfoundland School Society (nss), who received a portion of the grant, presented an enormous obstacle to Bishop Feild. He could box the compass and choose any direction, but he nearly always sailed into the nss. Here was a Church of England mission set up in numerous outports that did not acknowledge his authority as bishop, but operated instead as an independent organization. He had no authority over the hiring of its teachers, their theology, or where they were placed. This Anglican society, closed shut as a mollusk to his Tractarian spirituality, blocked his progress in many harbours, and not only that, its government grant for education stood in the way of funding for Tractarian schools. Roman Catholics in government were in no frame of mind to help him remove the nss from the public ledger, for they “resented the virtual stranglehold which the Anglican establishment held on political power and patronage.”18 Ironically, the Protestant Methodists joined the Roman Catholics politically to prevent Feild from obtaining subdivision, and more generally to break Church of England hegemony in the colony. This is fine work, but it is only the tip of the iceberg in the study of Edward Feild.19 Edward Feild studied at Queen’s College, Oxford, and graduated with an ma in 1826, and that year lost in a bid for a fellowship at Oriel College, but to challenging competitors: Richard Hurrell Froude and Robert Isaac Wilberforce. He attended the divinity lectures of the High Churchman Charles Lloyd, who ordained him in December 1827, Lloyd having himself been ordained bishop of Oxford the previous March. Appointed curate at nearby Kidlington, Feild gained a reputation for his addresses on the Swing Riots and drunkenness, in which he praised the blessings of agricultural machinery and cheap beer for the poor. In 1834 he became a rector of English Bicknor in Gloucester, where he again had to deal with poverty, drunkenness, and violence, but this time gained notoriety for his “thorough and minute” inspection of schools, which won him an appointment as inspector of schools for the National Society in 1839. His outstanding school reports brought him to the attention of Bishop Blom-

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0.2 Bishop Feild’s cathedral

field of London and likely figured in his being appointed a colonial bishop in 1844.20 As for Feild’s brand of Anglicanism, Jones seemed reluctant at first to label him, but later stated that he had “markedly pro-Tractarian beliefs.” Moreover he was also influenced by “the Cambridge Ecclesiologists” and for his cathedral Feild engaged the services of George Gilbert Scott. In fact, he had drawings of wooden churches sent to the Camden Society for approval. More recently the architect Peter Coffman determined that Feild was “steeped in the architectural theories of the Cambridge Camden Society (later renamed the Ecclesiolgical Society),” who believed that Gothic was “the natural and correct architectural expression” of the Oxford Movement. Sherri Sanderson, in her theological study of Feild, also concluded

12

Beating against the Wind

that Feild was a Tractarian and that he built churches in accordance with the guidelines of the Camden Society “in order to bring concrete expression to his Tractarian sacramentalism in church architecture and design.”21 Anglicans and their clergy in Newfoundland in the eighteenth century, and elsewhere in British North America for most of it, lived without bishops. The impetus for such was to grant “the full privileges of the Church” to the Loyalists who had fled “with horror from the republican institutions of the independent states,” from New England to Nova Scotia. However, accustomed to ministering on their own, many actually “resented” the imposition of the new colonial authority when the first bishop of Nova Scotia was appointed for British North America in 1787. When Charles Inglis (1734–1816) attempted to defend the “dignity and importance” of his office, he was met with “ridicule.”22 It was not until the summer of 1827 in the fortieth year of the episcopate that John Inglis, the third bishop of Nova Scotia, visited Newfoundland and by then, many graves were unconsecrated and many children had passed into adulthood without the rite of confirmation. But it was the clergy ordained in England and sent away from their dioceses to the colonies who were probably most aware of the Church of England anomaly, since they were able to minister without having to answer to any real authority. Yes, the Newfoundland clergy sent their quarterly reports to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (spg) in London, and officially they were answerable to the bishop of Nova Scotia in Halifax, but from there the absentee lord, to the extent that he cared at all, was as powerful as a man attempting to push a rope. His first archdeacon and commissary, George Coster (1794–1859) was appointed in 1825 at Bonavista, followed by Edward Wix (1802–66) at St John’s, but they exercised anemic authority over clergy.23 The first bishop of Newfoundland, Aubrey George Spencer (1795–1872), who arrived in 1840, expanded the number of clergy but seems to have left them to serve as they would and fend as they might with their £200 salaries from the spg. As one wrote of his attitude to academic study, so he approached his episcopacy: “His peculiar temperament and tastes were so buoyant and free as to be against the millwheel work of steady acquisition in any subject not voluntarily chosen.”24 Unlike Coster and Wix, he enlisted the aid of the evangelical Newfoundland School Society to expand and strengthen his church, which meant that the Church of England in Newfoundland was no longer a divided house. With a united front, increased salaries, and an increased clerical roster of twenty-six by 1843, it posed a renewed threat to the Methodists, who aspired to be the leaders of the Protestant cause in Newfoundland. To carry out their goal, the Newfoundland Auxiliary Wesleyan Missionary Society had resolved in 1839 to fund more than their thirteen missionaries, es-

Introduction

13

pecially to areas “scarcely ever visited by the Missionaries of any Protestant denomination,” but now they would have to play catch-up instead.25 With the arrival of Bishop Edward Feild in 1844 there was a seismic shift in the topography of episcopacy for both the clergy and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. As a Tractarian bishop, buttressed with a newly invigorated and romanticized view of the apostolic succession, Feild came as the ultimate colonizer. Like other Tractarian colonial bishops, such as John Medley (1804–92) in New Brunswick and Francis Fulford (1803–68) at Montreal, his sharp self-understanding of episcopal authority fuelled his sense of mission and multiplied his determination to carry it out. And colonial bishops were generally Tractarian. This was unlike in England, where, during the time of intense controversy over ritual and doctrine, “Tractarians were almost completely excluded from the bench of bishops.”26 Bishops at home were appointed by a prime minister who was sensitive to public opinion, but bishops for the colonies were “chosen by a group called the Colonial Bishops Council, founded in 1841 as an offshoot of the spg and controlled by high-church and tractarian Anglicans.”27 As a result, as Christopher Headon concluded, “The power of the Oxford Movement in Canada owed much to the strong episcopal support it was able to command. This provided it with the apparatus and authority for extending its scope over so wide an area.”28 The Edinburgh Review in 1863 questioned the enormous cost of the Tractarian push for colonial sees to about forty and compared the Church of England continuing “to appoint a bishop for every nook over which the English flag floats, merely because none but bishops can ordain or confirm” to “burning the house to roast the pig.” Some appointments were absolute sinecures, for instance, St Helena with 6,000 people, Capetown, and Quebec after the diocese was subdivided. Furthermore, given the pluralism in the colonies, the pretension of territorial titles, such as “Edward Newfoundland,” was simply “absurd.” Such titles were “really mischievous from the false ideas they create.” But Ernest Hawkins (1802– 68), secretary to both the spg and the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund, would entertain no such talk. He replied categorically to the criticism, “The stability and progress secured to the Church of England in the colonies by the foundation of between 40 and 50 bishoprics I regard as incomparably the most important and enduring work which that Church has accomplished in this generation.”29 Bishop Feild also replied with his Appeal for Colonial Dioceses. With his Oxonian understanding, he too believed that where there was no bishop there was no Church of England. He was in agreement with Charles Blomfield (1786–1857), bishop of London, that energetic promoter of bishops in the colonies, who declared in 1840, “An episcopal church without a bishop is a contradiction in terms.” As Feild’s contemporary bi-

14

Beating against the Wind

ographer, H.W. Tucker, stated, “He had a real and intense faith in the Church, and in his own office as a bishop of that Church … he thus believed unhesitatingly in his office.”30 As a result Feild walked into the churches of the people and into the ministry of the clergy with such a presumption of entitlement to redirect both that they were at first taken aback. How could this man so disregard their Church of England spirituality, which they had taken responsibility upon themselves to cultivate? Their alarm was exacerbated by Bishop Feild’s hands-on approach to ensure “Order and Uniformity” in the minute details of their ministry, for “an exact adherence to ecclesiastical order was a distinctive mark of his episcopate.” As his fellow bishop, the Tractarian John Medley of Fredericton, assessed him, he was “exact and punctilious in his requirements of duty.” He had a reputation for being “autocratic and imperious; he was called on occasions a Martinet.” With a bishop attempting to wield authority in such a strict and meticulous manner, Anglicans had to ponder as never before how to deal with this new colonial administrator of their church affairs, which up to that time they had been largely taking care of themselves. Bishop Medley arrived in New Brunswick in 1845, a year after Feild, with as defined and determined a Tractarian vision but with a somewhat different approach. He highly valued “order” but was not so rigid on “uniformity.” In his view, the whole history of the Church of England since the Reformation demonstrated that “the enforcement by law of absolute conformity” was a “failure.” For instance, he blamed the bishops for causing “the schism” with John Wesley (1703–91) instead of making a place for his spirituality. Medley envisaged the Church of England “built on a more popular basis,” as he told his clergy in his 1868 Charge, one that could embrace “Low Churchman, High Churchman, or Ritualist … there ought to be charity enough to make use of his zeal and piety, though … our conclusions may widely differ.” His contrast with Feild and with his former bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts (1778–1869), in allowing a measure of diversity is pronounced. For example, while Phillpotts had imposed the surplice while preaching, Medley allowed latitude in church matters for both clergy and congregation. When a missionary at Hampton, New Brunswick, upset his congregation, Medley, who personally favoured wearing the surplice, told the clergyman that since there was no church law for or against it, he should follow the wishes of his congregation. Barry Craig, a Medley biographer, who drew attention to Medley’s attitude of tolerance within the diocese, noted that it was the bishop’s view that because there were insufficient directions in the Prayer Book, uniformity was “both impossible and undesirable.” In contrast, it was the bent of Bishop Feild to “coerce uniformity.” Craig determined that Feild lacked the “prudence” of Medley, for while the

Introduction

15

latter had his share of disputes, he “sought consensus and preached toleration,” in contrast to Feild, who took an “aggressive” stance on “obedience and doctrinal uniformity.”31 In the Church of England missionary writings, Newfoundland was often portrayed as a land of decadence and degeneration to which colonial clergy were required to go and perform a moral rescue, lest it lapse altogether into heathenism. For instance, in the eighteenth century, James Balfour, a missionary who had moved from Trinity Bay to Conception Bay, the most developed in the colony, wrote that he was sent among “a barbarous, perfidious, and cruel people.”32 Tucker stated in the nineteenth century that upon Feild’s arrival in Newfoundland “large numbers” of the people were “heathens … wholly removed from all sounds and sights of religion, and sunk into utter spiritual vacancy.” And George Balleine was still continuing to write in the twentieth century that when Samuel Codner (1776– 1858) founded the nss in 1823, “Newfoundland at this time was one of the plague spots of the Empire, a land where the white man had almost sunk back into barbarism … These people had sunk into a state of indescribable degradation.”33 However, there is little in Tucker’s biography of Bishop Edward Feild to indicate that immorality was more than an occasional issue that the bishop had to address. It certainly was not the primary impetus of his mission. Tucker went on to state the opposite. He noted that Feild regarded hard-working Newfoundland and Labrador fishermen and their families as more virtuous than many of their supposedly advanced contemporaries. He referred, for instance, to Feild’s journal entry at Francis Harbour in 1848 when a schooner brought newspapers from England with news of the June uprising in Paris, in which Feild contrasted the “peaceful, holy and rational employments” of Labrador to the “murder and madness” in the so-called civilized world.34 Similarly, at Baker’s Tickle, near Rose Blanche, he was amazed at the love and care shown to a family overcome with sickness, and he wondered “whether such charity would be shown in more civilized places.”35 He did say he found instances of a “state of heathenish ignorance” in White Bay, but he was referring to women baptizing children, and to one harbour where there was “no common burying place.” At Little Harbour Deep he was impressed that the people were “not so wild as might be expected from their wild and lonely life … they are not heathens or savages. The woman, though rowing, was very neatly dressed, with a necklace, but no other superfluous finery; the man was tidy: both were civil.” An instance of what he identified as a case of “heathenish barbarity” happened near Ireland’s Eye in Trinity Bay when a corpse was left “lying on the beach with the flesh torn off the face and hands by the birds of prey.”

16

Beating against the Wind

A schooner from Conception Bay had put the man ashore when he was taken ill with cholera.36 Nina Goudy, in her study of the Northern Circuit Court, 1826–33, found that during those eight years, in the population of nearly 30,000 there were 172 “true bills,” that is, matters for which the grand jury believed there was enough evidence to proceed to trial. Of these, 84, or approximately 10 annually, had to do with types of assault. In one instance Mary Smith was charged with “assaulting her nephew, Thomas Gosse. Smith had thrown a hatchet at Gosse after he shot her dog for attacking his calf. The hatchet had missed Gosse and hit a nearby fence.” She was not sentenced, but possibly gave an apology. The travelling court “addressed on average 246 [cases] a year, of which 239 were civil actions, most of them by far for debt.” In 1860 John Thomas Mullock (1807–69), the Roman Catholic bishop of the diocese of St John’s, observed, “Out of a population of over 130,000, we have rarely more than eight or ten prisoners in jail, and grievous crimes, are, happily, most rare, capital offenses scarcely heard of.”37 There was an instance of severe violence on the west coast, or the French Shore, where there were no official magistrates or jails. A gang maimed for life “a man named Pennel” and as a result he was “confined to his house for nearly 9 years,” and broke the collar bone of another, but that assault was inflicted not by the settlers, but by the crew of a vessel that came into port in Bay St George. It was the only such case noted in Henry Lind’s diary while he served as a clergyman for over a decade in that area of Newfoundland, which was regarded at the time as beyond the restraints of civilization.38 Feild’s focus was not morality, or the lack of it, but Tractarian spirituality. His hand was engaged in writing what amounted to a perpetual plea for more and better missionaries to rescue the people, not from “spiritual vacancy,” but from the very full spirituality of Roman Catholicism and Methodism.39 He saw himself in an Olympian competition, and much more was at stake than a wreath of laurel. He cried out to Ernest Hawkins, secretary to the spg, “If the Church of England cannot send out Missionaries … between Popery and Methodism we either crumble to nothing or are crushed.”40 Yet Roman Catholicism was never a serious threat to Bishop Feild. He himself came to the conclusion after twenty years of observation that “the Romanists gain only by marriage.”41 Yes, some Anglicans were lost through marriage, but that cut both ways. There was indeed great dismay over the decrease in Church of England members at Ferryland and on the Southern Shore generally, and at Placentia, but that conversion to Catholicism was before Feild’s arrival, although there were subsequent losses occasionally, for instance, with the high-profile conversion of Peter Winser (ca. 1781–1864) at Aquaforte.42 Keough found that there was significant English

Introduction

17

Protestant conversion to Irish Roman Catholicism on the Southern Shore, such as “the great part” of 140 candidates for confirmation at Renews in 1835. However, it was initiated not by clergy but by the people themselves. Beginning in the late eighteenth century “with the increasing numbers of Irish arriving in the area, conversion and assimilation … likely correlated significantly to the growing numbers of Irish Catholics in the marriage pool.” There were losses in Placentia Bay where there were conversions to Roman Catholicism also before Feild’s arrival. For instance, when Bishop Fleming visited Merasheen in 1835, where the Anglican Charles Blackman had a “small, but attentive” congregation on his visit ten years earlier, he confirmed eighty-six people and twenty-six were former Protestants.43 Methodism was another matter. Over the course of his tenure Bishop Feild lost thousands to Methodism, as we shall see. People flocked in droves for ecstasy over solemnity, presence over transcendence. The unstated battle that Feild was fighting in Newfoundland and Labrador was Protestantism, and it included not just Methodists but even more the evangelical Anglicans of his own church. In many instances Anglicans and Methodists fellowshipped and worshiped together, maintaining Wesley’s original vision of a renewal movement within the Church of England. Newfoundland Anglicanism had been further fortified in evangelicalism since 1823 by the Newfoundland School Society. The burden of Samuel Codner, a Devonshire merchant at Petty Harbour,44 was to provide a free evangelical Anglican education to the children of fishermen, and by the time of Bishop Feild’s arrival in Newfoundland the society had over forty day schools in operation. The Church of England historian Thomas Millman noted its contribution as practically the sole provider of education in the outports.45 The education was quite evangelical for, in the context of reading and writing, the society promoted “those blessed truths which alone are able to make men wise to salvation, through faith in Jesus Christ.” And it was Anglican, being expressly according to principles “as received and taught by the Church of England.”46 Moreover, the nss teachers also served as lay readers, further fortifying Newfoundland Anglicanism with large doses of evangelicalism.47 Thus, Church of England evangelicalism stood in front of Bishop Feild like a great promontory around which he continually had to navigate, and he often ran aground on its shoals, for he came from England not to support the Anglicanism already present, but to replace it with another, to erase the imprint of evangelical Anglicanism prominent in the colony and to supplant it with his preference. This was Bishop Feild’s quest in Newfoundland. His love for Tractarian or Gothic Anglicanism was the motivation of his prodigious energy, the focus of his meticulous administrative attention, and the major cause of his many battles. Thus, his mission

18

Beating against the Wind

was to carry out an assault on the Anglicanism that was, and to attempt to substitute another. To this end he laboured and to this end he spent and was spent. But how successful was he in his Tractarian charge against the Protestant quintain? The Newfoundland historian Daniel Woodley Prowse (1834–1914), son of the evangelical Robert Prowse, stated in the 1890s that his triumph was indeed complete, that “his powerful influence changed the whole character of the church and the clergy in the colony. The ministers had all belonged to the Evangelical or Low Church type; one of this school is now a rara avis in the diocese.”48 But Prowse looked at the man, more than he did the people. To him, “our great Anglican prelate,” while not of the stature of the politician William Carson, was yet another “great man” of Newfoundland history. Inhabitants of the outports in contrast were just “simple out-harbour people” waiting to be led, and certainly with no inclination or ability to oppose whatever the prelate had in his heart and head regarding a reconfiguration of Anglicanism.49 Remarkably, later scholars uncritically accepted Prowse’s opinion. Elinor Senior, in her dcb entry, quoting Prowse, agreed that “under Bishop Feild’s powerful influence, the character of the church in Newfoundland changed.” More recently, Peter Coffman concluded that at least in architecture “the sense of adversity and struggle … had abated. Ecclesiology had won the day.” Similarly, Frederick Jones determined that at the end of Feild’s episcopate, “he had almost eliminated Evangelicals” and “Evangelicalism was no longer a force.” To defend that conclusion he drew on the judgment of one lone visitor, R.B. McCrea, who wrote an entertaining book, but just eight years earlier had to thrash about London, desperate to find any information on Newfoundland where he was being sent, but found “scarce a syllable.” And even McCrea can be variously interpreted. Yes, he wrote in 1869 that the evangelical “battle” was “happily now over.” But he also stated that “it left scars deep and scarcely to be healed” and went on to quote as evidence a pamphlet making the rounds at that very moment that protested the wearing of Tractarian attire in a church service. It is noteworthy that in Prowse’s “supplement” on the churches, William Pilot, the superintendent of Church of England schools, agreed that during Bishop Spencer’s episcopate “both the Church and the Clergy in the Colony were of the Evangelical or Low Church School,” and he agreed that Feild gathered clergymen around him who were “like-minded with himself,” but Pilot did not go on to say that Feild “changed the whole character of the church.” Even more significantly, Jones himself at the end of his biography noted the theological dissonance that persisted between the people and the clergy Feild had appointed. He quoted from the annual report of W.J. Merriot, inspector of the nss schools, who stated

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shortly after Feild’s death that Anglicans were “everywhere opposed to Ritualism” and were pining for an evangelical bishop. He figured that the Anglican hierarchy would impose Ritualism even more, except that it “would drive the congregation into Wesleyan Meeting houses.”50 With its focus on popular religion, this book argues that while Feild had success with some clergy, certainly not all, he had to face continued popular opposition, so that Protestant Anglicanism remained the spirituality of choice for a significant portion of the Church of England in Newfoundland and Labrador. It is correct that from Francis Harbour in the north to Lamaline in the south, Feild left a deep footprint of Gothic architecture on the landscape. Still, there were also notable instances of a modified Gothic in response to popular insistence that people’s spiritual values be architecturally accommodated, as they were at Greenspond. Even where unmodified Gothic churches were constructed, the question remains as to how effective the bishop and his clergy were in incubating Tractarian spirituality within the Gothic boxes.51 People negotiated their spirituality by resisting the new Anglicanism in a variety of ways. Some gave Feild outright opposition, such as Anglicans at Harbour Buffett and Harbour Grace. Others made a Gothic accommodation to the expression of their evangelical faith, and still others, especially on the northeast coast, were civil to the bishop, even friendly, but largely ignored what he said. However, giving the bishop the slip did not take care of matters sufficiently for many Anglican worshippers. Repelled by the strange taste that began to appear in the well, they drank from what they deemed were the more palatable springs of Methodism. For those who remained in the Church of England, their resilience against Tractarianism was aided by Feild’s lack of means. The scarcity of priests and of funds to finance imposing Gothic structures prevailed in the ever-increasing numbers of small outports in nineteenth-century Newfoundland and Labrador.52 Settlements visited by the clergyman once or twice a year entered little into the Tractarian mission of Bishop Feild, and even less so if the clergyman held the service in a kitchen or parlour. Of even more significance were the facts of winter transhumance and of other mobile pursuits such as the Labrador and seal fisheries. While in winter quarters, many settlers would be almost as surprised to see a priest as they would to encounter a Tractarian saint from the church calendar, and when the priest did appear he had only whatever spiritual gravitas he carried in his person.53 During the Labrador and seal fisheries, except for a chance visit to Forteau or Battle Harbour, the only thing Gothic was the hint of it in the outline of an iceberg. Therefore, the required ideography of Tractarian spirituality was non-existent for a mobile people. What prevailed for many in the Church of England for up to three-quarters of the year was the

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Beating against the Wind

Protestant verbal spirituality of testimony, tracts, Prayer Book, and Bible, as they wintered in the woods up in the bays, and as they worked and socialized, often alongside Methodists on the decks of schooners and on ice pans. Thus, when they were near a Tractarian clergyman, there was a disinclination to surrender that popular spirituality to priest and chancel. Though he had to beat against the wind from these different points on the compass, Feild had a great advantage in being fond of all things nautical. With its coastal people, Newfoundland and Labrador was an ideal diocese for the bishop. He loved the sea.54 Despite his Tractarian penchant for lancet windows, placed high in the Gothic box so as to let the light in but prevent parishioners from looking out, Feild himself, shortly after his arrival, was blessed with the view of “a beautiful sea” through large Protestant panes during a church service at Upper Island Cove, Conception Bay. As he recorded the event, “The sea through the windows of the church during the whole service, with the bold, bluff rocks projecting into it and the little boats scattered about it and all calm and bright and beautiful, continually caught my eye and deeply pleased and affected me.” A couple of weeks later at a picnic on Bell Island, with mariner’s delight he noted, “The day was fair, calm and bright … Before us lay the beautiful blue sea, just buffeted by a wind, which promised us a quick and pleasant sail homewards.”55 And he loved his yacht. In the Hawk he could travel anywhere and on his own time to carry out his mission in Newfoundland and Labrador. Funded as bishop with £1,200 annually, he hired captain and crew and travelled in the beautiful summertime almost as free as the gulls and stearins flying over his head and about the masts of his vessel. A clergyman who accompanied him observed that he “seemed always happy and contented on board the old Hawk, and enjoyed pacing the deck in the summer’s twilight, singing … Psalms.” His love for schooners and ships stood out from the very beginning. On a Sunday morning in his first September in Newfoundland, he looked out his window and “saw the Narrows completely crowded with vessels entering the harbour.” These were schooners, mostly from the northeast coast, bringing their dried salt fish to St John’s merchants to “settle their accounts” and acquire supplies for the winter. Feild was so delighted with the scene, finding it “so striking and interesting,” that he called his fellow-clergyman Charles Palairet twice to admire the view. And in the midst of the vessels he thought he saw his own ship come in. The vessel came to anchor but he could not make out the name, so he was not sure. Disciplined man that he was, instead of going down to the wharf to find out for certain, he and Palairet walked in the opposite direction over the crest of the hill, losing sight of the harbour on the way to their sched-

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0.3 The Hawk

uled church service in Torbay. On returning that evening, he found that it was indeed the Hawk “sixteen days from Torquay.”56 Feild had the tremendous fortune of having a yacht donated for his personal use as bishop. It was “the munificent gift” of Robert Eden, rector of Leigh, Essex. Eden had originally given him the 105-ton brig Emma Eden, but Feild, figuring that it was too large and with too deep a draft for entering the harbours and coves of the Newfoundland coast, requested that it be sold, and instead the Hawk was bought, which at 56 tons could still serve as “a small floating church.”57 He was a little worried about its name. The bird has talons and beak that are large and powerful, adapted to tearing flesh. As a bird of prey, it is a far cry from that other bird of Christianity, and the symbolism was not lost on Feild. “I trust, [it] will not be or deemed a ravening bird of prey but the herald of peace and consolation and of a good hope through grace.” Others were worried too. One writer in fine understatement deemed that the name was “not so indicative of the sacred object for which she is gone.” Another called the name outright “unchristian.” Feild had hoped to get the name changed to “Hawkins” after the spg secretary, or to “Eden” after the donor, but it was not to be.58 Hawk it remained.

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At fifty-six tons it was no tub or knock-about. Feild loved his yacht so much that he was reluctant to leave it. He spent only two nights ashore on his three-and-one-half-month 1849 voyage, and three nights in 1853 “rather of necessity than choice,” because there was no safe anchorage at Bonavista and he therefore had to walk from Catalina, where even there it had taken “nearly an hour to beat into the harbour.” On his 1855 voyage he spent only one night ashore, and that because there was too much wind to row out to the vessel. He said that but for the expense and the lack of exercise, he “would be content to live on board altogether.” He did just that in 1848 when he returned to St John’s in mid-October after a three-month voyage, remaining on board until the end of the month, “well content with my Church ship,” and attending services on shore.59 Feild, who with his fellow Tractarians espoused self-denial as a lifestyle, “fasting and abstinence” and “renouncing the vanities … of a perishing world,” a never-ending Lent, was alarmed that his vessel quickly became known as his “floating palace.” Possibly to keep that notion at bay, he made only muted and spiritual “churchship” references to the vessel in his published journals.60 In contrast, Martin Blackmore, missionary at Burgeo, was wide-eyed at the bishop’s “beautiful yacht.” Travelling for the first time with Feild to Port aux Basques, he wrote in his private journal that “the accommodations on board the Bishop’s yacht are excellent. There is a private cabin for his Lordship and a large cabin containing six sleeping berths … very lofty and well lighted.”61 Feild or his editor wrote that the Hawk was “(by some persons unjustly called) the Bishop’s yacht.” This is of course correct if it meant, as Feild disclaimed of his 1853 three-month visit to England, that it was “for my private affairs or interests only.” But still, as bishop it was he who had the de facto ownership of the vessel to sail as he would, when he would, and where he would, and a captain and crew to help him on his way. “Cruizing” about on the Hawk was living high on the hog compared to that servant of science, Jeffries Wyman (1814–74), a graduate of Harvard who was also visiting Labrador upon Feild’s arrival in the summer of 1849, but in a small cutter with “the wretched accommodation” for him and his crew of only one room in which to eat, sleep, cook, and do experiments.62 Wyman’s fellow researcher Horatio Storer was a bit awed with the bishop sailing about “in such fine style,” having “every convenience that could be wished for.” He noticed that Feild had “his own private apartment” and that he was careful to visually display his authority and mission by positioning at the head of the table “a little altar surmounted by the bishop’s mitre.” Nevertheless, a bit of sport was not out of the question. “We saw ready for use a fishing rod that with the brace of curlew hanging from the prayer book stand on deck we thought might be characteristic.”63 Thus Feild fitted perfectly R.C. Caswall’s

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0.4 A journal of Bishop Feild

advertisement of Newfoundland in the Colonial Church Chronicle as a fine place for any clergyman who was “fond of boating,” since he “can have that recreation to his heart’s content, and in the way of duty too, so that the time is not misspent; for the various missions in a missionary’s district can only be reached by water, as a rule.”64 Feild’s lifestyle in his diocese is in great contrast to the picture of hardship and self-denial painted by the missionary literature for consumption

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in England. For instance, Feild himself wrote to a friend, “This Diocese is, perhaps, of all our great colonial empire, the most uninviting in respect of all worldly comforts and advantages. The length and rigour of the winters, the bleak and barren nature of the soil.” Similarly, “There are some regions of the earth where climate and country are so beautiful that they do much to cheer the Missionary in his labours. It is not so, however, with Newfoundland. Perhaps there is no part of the world which presents to the missionary fewer attractions. There are no green fields, no beautiful trees and flowers, no rich fruits, no sweet voices of singing birds, and only for a very short time of the year does the sun shine to make glad the heart of man. The winters are long, stormy, and intensely severe … fishermen … are content to cling to their barren ice-bound country … this bleak and barren land.” W.E. Gladstone (1809–98) stated that Feild “buried himself for life in the frost and fog of Newfoundland.”65 That was an overstatement. Most winters he found work to do in that other part of his diocese – Bermuda. He admitted in one of his Bermuda Charges that “it is a great comfort and great refreshment … to retire occasionally from the frosts and storms of Newfoundland to this genial and peaceful country.” In 1851 he planned to return to the “the ice and snow, the frost and cold, of Newfoundland” in January, but did not manage to get away from Bermuda until the latter part of April.66 An examination of his itinerary shows that his lifestyle was nearly as migratory as the fishermen and that Bermuda was his “winter quarters” for a majority of the years of his episcopacy, at least eighteen, and also during March 1864. Considering that he spent at least three winters in England, this means that he spent, at the most, eleven of the thirty-two winters of his episcopate in “the frost and cold” of Newfoundland.67 Though he asked that the Diocese of Newfoundland and Bermuda be divided, and was willing to give up his £400 of the latter, he said he would agree to be bishop of either. He spoke fondly of the sunny islands with their “fruits and flowers in the month of January.” One wonders how much episcopal work there could have been in Bermuda with its population of just over 10,000. A territory of slightly over twenty square miles (fifty square kilometres), not even half the size of Merasheen Island, Placentia Bay, it had nine clergy in 1849, which was almost one for every two square miles.68 Coming to Newfoundland in the spring, he would stay in St John’s a month or two, in 1855 he stayed only five days, and then he was off in his yacht around the coast carrying out such episcopal ceremonies as consecrating graveyards and churches – graveyards that the residents had cleared, fenced, and painted amidst their many labours, and churches they had built with frames and boards from logs they had dragged from the woods over

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ice and snow, and chopped and sawn with pit-saws and axes.69 The account of his very first voyage in the Hawk is careful to point out that “this was no pleasure excursion,” but this could not have meant that there was no ancillary pleasure in it.70 Sailing about Newfoundland and Labrador in July and August with the fresh summer breezes blowing in one’s hair was not that much sacrifice in the mid-1800s, and is not still. Now, it is true he occasionally encountered a little fog on the south coast, but he often escaped that when he sailed in August and September. Feild even spoke fondly of the beauty of various coves, harbours and bays he entered. For instance, he went up to the mouth of a river from Burnt Islands on the south coast, possibly to do some trouting, and was taken with the beauty of the many waterfalls as he walked along the river observing “more birds than ever” he had seen in Newfoundland up to that time in the forest of “mountain ash, birch, beech, hemlock … fir and spruce.” Upon returning to his vessel he found he could look forward to a fine meal of smoked salmon that a fisherman had brought to him while he was away.71 While spending three weeks amid the “beauty of the lofty and precipitous hills” and “the most picturesque mountains I ever saw” of White Bay, he advertised, “I can hardly fancy a greater treat than to sail for 3 or 4 weeks through the reaches and tickles of this Bay.” Not only that, though summer was not the season for slaughter, he was able to obtain “a small supply of milk and fresh meat” – beef and lamb – in addition to “the fish and salmon, of which we have abundance for nothing.” Similarly, in early August the people of Twillingate welcomed him with “fresh meat, butter, milk, vegetables, soft bread, &c.”72 Thus he got the best of food. The official Church of England press presented an austere diet of having to eat “hard bread for more than a week at a time” and to “not taste fresh meat for a month.”73 Yet in one of the least settled bays he was still brought “many presents of milk, butter, and bread,” no doubt fresh, right out of the bake pot.74 While fresh beef would have been scarcer, except at places like Codroy, there was always fresh cod right out of the water, fresh capelin, fresh herring, fresh mackerel, fresh and smoked salmon, and fresh lobster if he so desired. So the fare wasn’t all that bad. Certainly, from the generosity of the fishermen and Feild’s habit of heading straight for the merchants and their agents as soon as he entered a harbour, he got the best there was. For instance, on his 1867 voyage he “left Rose Blanche … laden with presents from Messrs Ridley’s bountiful ‘Room.’” Thus while Feild was exact in Tractarian interior arrangements of churches and liturgy, it would appear that his “visitations” caused him some difficulty in measuring up to that component of the ethos of Tractarianism having to do with “self-denial.”75 Still, these visitations gave him a tremendous advantage in the diocese of Newfoundland and Labrador.

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That other vessel, the man-of-war, might better carry the name of a bird of prey.76 Sailing into a harbour it was meant to frighten people into obeying the law of the empire by the sheer awe of its power and might. For example, Edward Evans, a deserter of a man-of-war in 1841, “carried the fear of being caught throughout his life. Whenever an official-looking ship would appear in nearby Botwood harbour, Edward would take his boat and disappear until the ship had gone.”77 Other “official-looking” vessels would include the governor in his yacht and the circuit court judges, also out on their summer-breeze voyages. Representatives of the power vested in these vessels of “order” entertained and assisted each other in their duties. John Inglis, the first Church of England bishop ever to appear in the bays and harbours of Newfoundland, showed up in 1827 accompanied by the British navy on the man-of-war hms Orestes, with eighteen guns, and to the south coast aboard hms Alligator, with twenty-eight guns. Archdeacon Wix and the clergyman William Bullock, in Church-Establishment style, went on church tours with the governor himself in his yacht. James Robertson was ferried about for part of his tour on the man-of-war, hms Manly, as he carried out exploratory work for Archdeacon Wix and Bishop Inglis. Bishop Feild was overawed when he saw the man-of-war hms Wellesley, with seventy-four guns, in Bay St George and was given the opportunity to entertain the admiral, Lord Dundonald, on board the Hawk, through the “really great man’s kindness and condescension,” and thus affirm their unity of purpose. As Feild wrote in his diary, “the juxtaposition” of the two vessels “might afford matter for reflection.” As the vessel left the bay he noted, “I shall always remember with pleasure, and perhaps I ought in sincerity to add pride, that the Church ship has been in such company.”78 Each waltzed with the other and endeavoured to establish order on the frontier. Feild proudly placed an episcopal flag from the admiral in his cathedral in St John’s.79 Feild feared that with Methodism, or with any other separation from the Church of England, in which people “choose forms of worship and teachers for themselves,” a tendency could lead to a “too possible disturbance of order and peace in the State.” He did not charge “any sect” with actually “preaching or teaching sedition, privy conspiracy, or rebellion” but saw it as “the very essence … of separating, in religion, to create disaffection and disunion,” which could lead to sedition and rebellion.80 Thus Feild saw order in the Church of England as maintaining or buttressing order in the empire. He sailed about in the Hawk in the summer as in a man-of-war enforcing laws, not about netting salmon rivers but about architecture and liturgy, laws that he had himself ordered out of his imagined Oxford universe. He exclaimed on one occasion, “I cannot be sufficiently thankful that I was enabled to occupy the ground at Burin, Harbor Briton, and La Poele,

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at a most critical juncture. How much do I and the Church owe to the sacred ship!”81 The vessel projected an imposing image, official and wellfunded with its church flag of imperial crown, cross of St George with four red crosses, and paschal lamb.82 But people were used to such vessels and to keeping a wide berth, if necessary, during the short time that they were in the harbour. Except for towns with magistrates, they were all birds of passage, with the vestigial effect of the memory of their presence. Feild had more leverage where there was deference to his office or person, or where he had a clergyman ardently seconding his “wishes and views.” Not all clergymen did. Feild, of course, was not the originator of this new religion of the Tractarian gospel as Church. The main hawser that he used for securing his vessel was made up of the three strands of John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, but there were other ropes on board, such as that of the trenchant Hurrell Froude.83 He persistently sailed the coast, year after year, with a tenacity unequalled before or since, determined to colonize the people by subjugating them to the Tractarianism of Oxford. But he was battered by the winds of evangelicalism, and on occasion his sails were torn to shreds by Methodist revivals. At all times he was in danger of being carried by the current, which threatened to run him aground on the rocks of Protestantism that lay beneath the surface of most of their ways. Thus, Edward Newfoundland, as he signed his name, found that bringing the claim into reality was an insurmountable and quixotic task.

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1 Tractarianism and Bishop Edward Feild Eastman brought us a present of fish and spruce beer, and humbly requested that his mistress, of whom he seems very proud, might come on board. To this I gladly assented, and he brought her and the wife of his neighbour (Matthews) on board, and their delight was extreme. I showed them my portable font and vessels for the Holy Communion, &c and they seemed to have the same effect as the exhibition of King Solomon’s treasures had upon the Queen of the South. He was very anxious that his wife should understand that all these things belonged to the Church and Church service, and added, “What vanity it would be to turn from such a Church.” [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation, 1849, 29

Tractarianism began as a reaction to forces in England that were as strong and as tumultuous as those the North Atlantic flung at the Newfoundland and Labrador sealers and fishermen. The 1833 assertion of the state over church affairs through the Irish Church Temporalities Bill that ten Irish bishoprics would be amalgamated sent John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Hurrell Froude “into paroxysms of anger.” That the bishoprics needed to be amalgamated because of “the Church’s ridiculously top-heavy bureaucracy” did not seem to have bothered the learned clergy.1 Rather it was that the state in the form of Prime Minister Grey and Parliament had deemed that they had the right to reach over the church fence and arrange matters, even if more efficiently than that arranged by the prelates. Moreover, Parliament was a haven of liberalism and evangelicalism.2 The Tractarians saw the answer to this meddling of the state and Dissenters in their affairs in energizing that old doctrine of the High Church, the apostolic succession of the episcopacy of the Church of England.3 Not just politically, as the apologetic for the independent authority of the church, but, theologically and ecclesiastically, apostolic succession became the keystone of the Tractarian arch without which its interlocking components would come crashing down upon their heads. It alone gave Bishop Feild in Newfoundland and Labrador his authority to consecrate graveyards and churches,

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made his clergy authentic and their baptisms “regenerative,” and that of the Methodists mere mimicry, and, certainly not least, enabled the Real Presence at the consecration of the elements at the Lord’s Supper. It was the Gorham controversy in England, in which the evangelical George Cornelius Gorham dared to state that one is regenerated or “born again” not at baptism, but at conversion, that caused the ecclesiastical Court of Arches to rule that his view opposed that taught by the Church of England. And again it was the state, through the Privy Council ruling him orthodox, that caused much gesticulation and the shaking of many mitres, including that of Bishop Feild. Feild charged his clergy with “baptismal regeneration” and gravely warned that if any one of them did not teach it, he would “suspend him straight.”4 While evangelical Anglican views are somewhat clear, it is difficult to discern the shades and subtleties of the Real Presence and baptismal regeneration as differentiated by High Church and Tractarian Anglicans. Nigel Yates discerned in the Tractarian view of the Eucharist “a profound break” with the past. Previously, High Churchmen thought of the Real Presence at the Eucharist “in the most general terms … only those who were worthy received the Body and Blood of Christ.” The leaders of the Tractarians took the focus off the communicants and began to teach a change in the elements themselves at consecration, so that all, regardless of piety, received the Body and Blood of Christ.5 The two sacraments became flashpoints because of the way Tractarian clergy strutted them to exhibit their spiritual potency acquired through the apostolic succession, which placed them above the sects of Protestantism, rebaptizing, for instance, those who already had been baptized in “the unreal church” of the Methodists.6 Empowered through the succession, they also began to offer auricular confession, which gave supplicants total absolution for their sins. By 1846 Edward Pusey (1800–82) publicly “advocated the regular and systematic use of auricular confession” by defending the practice in a sermon at the University of Oxford entitled The Entire Absolution of the Penitent. In transatlantic style, a few months later the St John’s Patriot reprinted an item from the Oxford Chronicle in which Pusey professed to know “thousands and thousands in the Church of England who used auricular and secret confession to a priest to their great comfort.”7 While Tractarianism was an assertion of church authority with political implications and a newly heightened High Church theology of priests and sacraments, it was also markedly “a difference of atmosphere … a sense of the whispering beauty and truth of divinity as its presence surrounded the soul.”8 This all-encompassing aspect of Tractarianism was born in romanticism and saturated with it. It was a retreat from what contemporaries saw as “times of such extraordinary excitement, amid such unparalleled discov-

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1.1 Heart’s Content, from the deck of the Great Eastern

eries and strange inventions.” Neither was the excitement to die down or the inventions to cease. In 1858 the transatlantic telegraph cable from Valentia Island, Ireland, to Bull Arm, Newfoundland, “sent a thrill of electric joy throughout two hemispheres” when “American genius and intellect … snatched the lightning from heaven, and made it a medium for the transmission of thought over mountains and under seas.” As a reaction to the excitement caused by industrialism, and to its noise and ugliness, and the crassness of living to make money, Tractarian clergy escaped to a fancied vision of a primitive past re-enacted in a neo-Gothic theatre. There the romanticism of apostolic authority and the existence of a pure, catholic Christianity, emanating not just from medieval times but from the ancient patristic era itself, transposed the worker from the clanging, banging, and jarring of machine and factory to a worshipful state of solemnity, created by the retro-aesthetic of numinous-inducing medieval architecture, lambent candlelight, and angelic chanting rising softly to the ceilings high above. It was spirituality through sensibility; the numinous through the sensuous, though it required an attitude of submission and surrender and a life of

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“moral rectitude” by the worshipper.9 The intense focus on such a setting resulted in an extreme demarcation of the sacred from daily life. Its effect was to confine God to a building made with hands. So much reverence and awe, yes, but so dependent on that Gothic box. Tractarianism is thus an apt example of an “invented tradition.” Eric Hobsbawm defined the concept as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with … a suitable historic past.” Tractarianism actually invented for itself the traditions of two imagined pasts, the Middle Ages for its architecture, and the patristic era for its liturgy and ritual. Moreover, as in the case of wearing the surplice while preaching, instead of the black gown, Tractarians ditched an actual tradition in England that had been prevalent since the Reformation – a clear illustration of the invention of tradition, as Hobsbawm states, “not because old ways are no longer available or viable, but because they are deliberately not used or adapted.” In fact, the Oxford Movement was “consciously setting itself against tradition for radical innovation.” The tradition “preserved in popular memory” was denigrated and discarded, and replaced with one invented by an exogenous clerical order for “the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour” that the Tractarian clergy were promoting. Thus under the guise of ancient ways they were throwing out the old and bringing in the new, but “novelty is no less novel for being able to dress up easily as antiquity.” Henry Pepys, bishop of Worcester, nonetheless did not agree with the invention and declared to his ordinands that because of the actual English tradition, “it is a mistaken notion to suppose that the surplice is the proper dress for you to wear in the pulpit.”10 It is ironic that while Tractarians bristled at the thought of Parliament making decisions that they regarded as encroaching on the church’s authority, that very house of popular power also dressed itself in Gothic. How could Gothic have become the invented tradition of both the Oxford Movement and the state with its burgeoning liberal democratic values, which they saw as threatening the very essence of the Church? David Cannadine suggests that, in fact, the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) was not built as a testament to Parliament and Reform at all, but instead, was “a royal stronghold rather than a democratic legislature,” with the latter being relegated to “a cramped and spartan house” with “insufficient seating for all the MPs.” The committee choosing the design reached for Augustus Pugin antiquity to portray stability precisely because they felt vulnerable in a time of Reform: “One of the architect’s prime concerns was to create a palace which would enhance the position and assert the prestige of the

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monarch vis-a-vis the Lords, the Commons and the people.”11 In the same way, Tractarians saw the Church of England in a desiccated and vulnerable state, and as a hoped for remedy, attached itself to Gothicism to portray identification with a fancied spirituality of the past. Along with solemnity, there was likely an absence of joy and confidence in one’s relationship to God in the Oxford Movement. The Church of England clergyman James S. Stone highlighted this trait in John Henry Newman (1801–90), possibly first, and not among equals, with Keble and Pusey in the Tractarian trinity. Stone, in an essay on Newman in 1891, drew attention to his most famous hymn, “Lead kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,” which he wrote upon seeing the faint light of a tiny lamp in a lighthouse off the coast of Sardinia, when they were becalmed for a whole week. He, ill from fever and feeling forlorn, and Hurrell Froude (1803–36) were trying to sail from Palermo to Marseille on what turned out to be a melancholy voyage on the deep. Stone suggested that the hymn was the measure of the man, no doubt tender and devout, yet “the sob of a soul … tied down by grief and fear.” What was notably absent in Newman, and not just in this particular hymn, was “the joy and peace of believing.” Newman simply never came to know “the lofty experiences of the Christian life.”12 It is true that he was only one of the tributaries of the Oxford Movement, but certainly a large one, as were the others. Evangelical Protestants, including those of the Church of England, and especially Methodists reaching for ecstasy, felt that the priests of solemnity offered an autumnal Christianity in place of one that was vibrant and joyous with the springtime of salvation, an asceticism in place of a spirituality that affirmed the fullness of life. Peter Nockles has questioned the spiritual “dryness” of the High Church that the Tractarians were reacting against. He saw Tractarianism more as a continuation than a break with the past. He called attention to voices within High Churchism that called for emphasis on the “importance of inward feelings” in one’s spiritual life. He agreed that in the immediate decades before Tractarianism “a declension towards ‘chilliness’” was “discernible” so that finally it was both “high and dry,” but there had been no long-term endemic want of spirituality.13 This questions the contemporary view of Dean Church, who viewed High Church religion as a “mere barren orthodoxy,” which was “dry, unspiritual, formal, unevangelical, self-righteous.” But, as James Pereiro observed, this verdict was not just the complaint of Tractarians, who could be regarded as having a vested interest in claiming the spiritual bankruptcy of the Church of England upon their arrival and before it. Rather, disparate individuals used “the language of crisis and decline” in their contemporary comment on the Church of England, though they offered a variety of solutions according to their ideologies, whether

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Thomas Arnold, the Rugby School headmaster, or the evangelical Edward Bickersteth, secretary of the Church Missionary Society. Neither did the view of a mere falling off in High Church devotional life, as an explanation for the Tractarian reaction to it, satisfy the John Henry Newman biographer Edward Short. Specifically referencing Nockles’s “slippery book,” he argued that to take Nockles’s view of Tractarianism as “the unconscious continuation of much that the eighteenth-century High Church had been doing requires one to imagine a very high level of unconsciousness in Newman, or ignorance.”14 The Tractarian John Keble (1792–1866) also saw the Church of England as an arid place that he aspired to water with his Christian Year in 1827. His word of comfort to the church is that as people prepared themselves, God Is ready yet with Moses’ rod, the hidden rill to charm Out of the dry unfathom’d deep Of sands, that lie in lifeless sleep … Again, Take Moses’ rod, the rod of prayer, and call Out of the rocky wall The fount of holy blood; and lift on high Thy grovelling soul that feels so desolate and dry.15 Regardless of how recent the phenomenon, all agreed that the Church of England was in a desiccated state in the early nineteenth century. In a strong reaction to this aridity, the Tractarians threw against it all the passion, resolve, and verve that the romantic era could muster. But it was romanticism with a difference, as Sheridan Gilley reminded scholars in “The Churching of Romanticism,” by drawing attention to Keble’s Lectures on Poetry delivered at Oxford between 1832 and 1841. Keble wanted nothing to do with the emotional outbursts of Methodist enthusiasts, or with the spasms and excess of Lord Byron. Yet he was equally repelled by the rationalism of the French Revolution and Thomas Paine arcing over the North Atlantic. It was the poet’s service to take both the raging thunderstorm and lightning excitement of human emotions, and contain them, so that they were produced in inspired calm and restful devotion. “Keble’s poets conquer their violent agitations of strong feeling by discharging them into poetry; and they recover health and wholeness and tranquility by giving their emotions poetic form, in a formal structure.” Ironically, in an analogy not from nature, but from industrialism, the poetic form acted like a steam boiler to make emotions more intense, yet enabled

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them to be released in a controlled manner. It was through poetry that Keble saw that the beauty of life and nature would awaken the spirituality of the liturgy of the Church of England in people’s hearts, and worshippers would come before God in reverence and awe.16 Of course, there were few signs of industrialization in Newfoundland in 1844 to ignite Feild’s contrasting romanticism upon arrival. The nearest hint of it would have been the numerous seal oil vats lining St John’s harbour to render fat to lubricate machinery back home.17 There may also have been the black smoke from a coal-fired vessel in the harbour.18 As for the utopian vision of coal in Newfoundland providing an opportunity for great industrial moment for the manufacture of iron, the geologist Joseph Beete Jukes (1811–69) had already determined that the imagined coal beds of Bay St George and Grand Lake were not thick enough to be of any account. He did not disallow further discovery of coal in the area, but he solemnly pronounced that “in no other part of the island of Newfoundland can coal ever be found.”19 In any case, Feild did not need the scathing effect of industrialized England that he had just left to incite his romantic disgust, for he abruptly encountered that in the “crag and scarp and base” of the North Atlantic shoreline of Newfoundland. Without Keble’s poetic restraint he exclaimed at the time, “And what a face – an iron mask … truly an ironbound coast.” The bleakness and barrenness of the deforested coast of the Avalon Peninsula continued to assault his John Constable sensibilities: “We see … the town of Carbonear lying upon the side of a bleak, desolate hill; the whole coast presents the like appearance, bleak and barren beyond all powers of description.” Similarly, the road to Petty Harbour “lies through the most rugged, rocky country that can be conceived. The hills on either side of the road are covered with immense boulders, lying in ruin and confusion … split, probably by the action of the frost … split and tossed about in wild array.”20 As he saw the landscape, so he saw the Church of England in Newfoundland. And while he could do little about the former, he came with a resolve to transform the latter. The title, theme, and command of Bishop Feild’s first charge to his clergy was Order and Uniformity in the Public Services, delivered a couple of months after his arrival. To carry out the vision of an imagined pure and ancient past, detailed in this charge, was the sustained focus of Bishop Feild’s quest during his decades-long ministry. Few documents, both in compliance and reaction, have had such a lasting impact on the culture, both material and intangible, of a significant portion of the population of Newfoundland and Labrador, for Feild gave his energy and authority to “order and uniformity,” not just in the public services of the church, but in everything that he felt he had authority over, and as bishop

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he did not narrowly define ecclesiastical. In his first charge, before he specifically addressed “the Public Services,” he gave his clergy additional “general exhortations to uniformity,” which he did not publish. In this way Feild operated in step as an ecclesiastical colonizer framing the situation of the Church of England in Newfoundland in his own terms of reference. In this discourse, diversity is designated as a problem that needs to be solved by uniformity, and anything not in accord with his view of Tractarian “order” is framed in the new system imposed by the bishop as chaos, disorder, or otherwise lacking propriety. Thus instead of coming alongside the Church of England in Newfoundland and Labrador to support its strengths, he merely laid over it the recent construction of Anglicanism framed by the Oxford Movement, and ordered that local spiritual values be conformed to it. Extreme in this regard, he determined to “charge” the clergy with his demands before he had heard their Anglican views. Their integrity as Church of England clergy was disregarded, and as for popular spirituality, Feild simply did violence to it by attempting to peremptorily displace local liturgical and architectural values. In this way the meticulous and tenacious Feild is an archetype of the colonizer in the ecclesiastical sphere.21 The energy and inflexibility with which he pursued this mission provides the social historian with an opportunity to view Protestant popular religion and culture in nineteenth-century Newfoundland and Labrador, the focus of this book. The prodigious energy he gave to his pursuit by which he repeatedly visited the whole of Newfoundland and the southern coast of Labrador resulted not just in a view of St John’s and Conception Bay, but in a panorama of the entire island, including the French Shore, and as far north in Labrador as Sandwich Bay. His iron inflexibility in pursuing uniformity provided a foil against which the spirituality of the people is given exceptional clarity. This clarity is further enhanced by popular resistance to the new ecclesiastical colonial initiative resulting in a social history that features religion as “a vital force” in Newfoundland and Labrador culture and society.22 Anglicans who initially opposed the changes made to bring about Tractarian uniformity were recorded as “ill-instructed and ill-disciplined.” Those who persisted and stood in the way of the changes, exercising a sense of their own independence and freedom to faithfully follow their traditional sentiments within the Church of England, were condemned as “conceited and disputatious,” suffering from “irreligion,” and demonstrating a “want of humility and docility.”23 It is this intolerance of Feild toward an alternate Church of England spirituality that caused him so much trouble. He readily admitted that he was conversant with the “the disputes and dissensions, the schisms and separations” prevailing in religion in general, and specifi-

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cally within Anglicanism in England, since he had “read, or heard, whatever has been urged of most weight.”24 Yet his mission of “order and uniformity” was an attempt to change nearly everything pertaining to the Church of England in Newfoundland and Labrador by ordaining conformity to his new Anglicanism. In his clerical charges, journals, and correspondence one fails to find any acknowledgment that there was an informed view of Anglicanism already prevailing in Newfoundland that had its own internally consistent interpretation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. But it is precisely his monomania to Gothicize popular religion, in a blinkered way attempting to charge through it, that generated resistance and affords a window through which to view this popular culture. Unlike Protestantism, Tractarianism tended to confine the holy to architectural space. Holiness was localized in a church building to such a degree that everything outside it became regarded as practically secular. The chancel, desired “in every possible case,” in largely resuming the place of the “Holy of Holies” in the Old Testament temple, displaced the New Testament concept of people as the temple of the Holy Spirit.25 Holiness was deposited in a Gothic structure and thus became confined to a geographical locality and to architectural space. Thus Tractarianism was a reversion to the largely exogenous spirituality of the temple focus in the Old Testament. While there was still the faint, glimmering light of the Protestant endogenous spirituality of the people themselves as vessels of the Holy Spirit, it was overpowered by the nearly total focus on chancel and priesthood. Thus popular spirituality was diminished and that of the clergy elevated. Those who did not prefer a chancel were referenced as having “ignorant prejudices.”26 The term Protestant became a pejorative epithet for those ignorant about, unappreciative of, or willfully disobedient to this hieratic enclosure of the spiritual. Tractarian episcopacy claimed that through its priesthood and its consecrated material objects it alone had the authority to grant spiritual “privileges,” if not to the world, certainly to all dutiful supplicants who were of English ancestry. Hence it was the values of order and submission that Feild highlighted in his visitation journals for admiration and emulation by people who gathered before him in outports around the island. He “hardly” met any “more pleasing” than the people of Burgeo, in large part because they were “obliging, docile and morigerous.” As the editor of Feild’s journal of his 1849 visitation stated in the Colonial Church Chronicle, “There is a decided improvement … we always find the services properly arranged … the ministers and the people in their proper places.”27 The last thing Feild wanted was people of an independent mind. Without Gothic all was in vain. Tractarianism housed itself in Gothic, and its ritual vitally depended on that internal Gothic architecture that was

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ecclesiologically “correct” to provide the stage for its repeated enactment of the experience of the holy. Solemnity, attained through the posture of reverence, was the primary characteristic of this desired experience. It inflected all worship. “Nothing can be too serious, and earnest and holy.”28 Without a Gothic theatre the Tractarian ritual would generate little mystery, and hence the obsessive attention of Bishop Feild to the material detail of “correct” church internal physical arrangement immediately on his arrival to St John’s and continually thereafter during his long tenure of missionary work in Newfoundland. The exclusive focus of the ritual was the altar by which Holy Communion was accessed. All interior physical order was subservient to it and arranged to heighten its spiritual paramountcy. It was granted preference in all matters – whether the segregated chancel constructed for it, its raised platform, the centre aisle before it, or its special cloths and candles. It was here that the priest carried out the primary purpose of his existence in nurturing and maintaining his own salvation and the salvation of the people. It was his restricted domain, upon which the people, with eyes fixed, were to behold from a distance. The pulpit, that dominant vehicle of Protestantism and evangelical Anglicanism, became a dispensable accessory, ever positioned on the periphery in the Tractarian theatre and never allowed to interfere with the main purpose of church. Characteristically, Bishop Feild, in Newfoundland for only a month, and just returned from visiting churches in Conception Bay, declared, “The pulpits generally should be taken down and the space about the altar enlarged, opened and beautified.” This “Newfoundland style” of church architecture had to be erased. It “threatened to remove any visible difference between the material Church … and any meeting house.”29 It was not the pulpit bearing the Word of God preached, but the altar bearing the sacramental Real Presence that was the vehicle by which the priest reverentially sought unity with the divine, an experience of the holy for himself and for the people as they solemnly contemplated and zealously peered into the sacramental mystery of communion with God that the priest mediated before them. There was a high degree of romanticism in this perception. Owen Chadwick saw the movement as a romantic reaction to the Age of Reason, a movement of the heart. Peter Nockles agreed with Chadwick, noting that Tractarianism was “a unique combination of moral strength and religious dynamism imbued with the spirit of Romanticism.” Sheridan Gilley went so far as to call the movement a mere “Churching of Romanticism.” While Nockles would not go that far, he does say that “the movement’s religious origins can be traced to a wider reaction against the rationalism of the so-called Age of Enlightenment.” Even Pereiro’s claim that it “imbibed” Aristotle and Joseph Butler does not refute the romantic essence of Trac-

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tarianism, but instead shows the movement choosing suitable trees that would provide good timber for its vessel.30 Instead of the prevailing empiricism of scientific positivism, Tractarians delighted in transcendence and mystery.31 We discern this thirst for awe and the sublime not just in architecture and ritual but in the perception of nature by Tractarian clergy. For instance, J.G. Mountain’s description of the mountainous Rencontre West, and its history, shows an emotional response that is steeped in a Bierstadt romanticism: “I have seldom seen a more picturesque spot than Rencontre … a deep bay of four or five miles runs in from the point of New Harbour, with magnificent headlands, and bold romantic caverns and rocks, and with almost fathomless water close at their base. The main part of the little settlement is pleasantly situated on a sloping beach, on which the treasures of the deep, the countless swarms of cod, have been dried year after year, since the father of the settlement, lately deceased, first established himself, and took possession of the place.” In contrast, it was not just the Methodism of Grand Bank that displeased him. Rather, its low and level landscape left his romantic sensibility totally underwhelmed and bereft of the sublime. Though the town was “tolerably neat,” that alone could not redeem it. It was “a dismal village,” and the reason was “the absence of trees or picturesque cliffs.” As his bishop said, when Mountain came to Newfoundland he “thought here it was all romance.” Similarly, it was Rencontre-like vistas that Feild’s church architect, William Grey (1819–72), chose as subjects for his Sketches of Newfoundland. The drawings show an aesthetic of winding paths, waterways, and steep inclines, such as in Aquaforte, Starve Harbour, Bell Isle Beach, and Toad’s Cove. It is not a coincidence that when Grey chose to remove himself from St John’s he retreated to Portugal Cove, sequestered in a valley, rather than to the less-defined and wide-ranging Torbay. In every view in the collection his romantic lens heightens the imagination by an accentuated verticality and seclusion. Even more, in Henley Island, Taylor’s Gulch, Deep Water Creek, and Petty Harbour stark cliffs, the haunt of the hawk, jut into the sky and into one’s consciousness with a primordial spiritual force.32 To what degree Newfoundland fishermen and their families entered into this romantic mirage of church or the natural environment is difficult to determine. We do know that in numerous places along the coast with three or four families there was no Gothic theatre and no likelihood of there ever being one. There was only the possibility of a kitchen Anglicanism, and in this environment the priest had to depend on his surplice, the intonation of his voice, and his general mien to communicate Tractarian mystery. This was a serious limitation. Without his altar, chancel, and Gothic architecture he was as a captain separated from his ship. Since most of

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1.2 Aquaforte, from a William Grey sketch

the people he ministered to had never been aboard his vessel, it was difficult for them to imagine the experience that he was trying to foster. No doubt, people along the south coast from Fortune Bay to Port aux Basques heard about the massive outlay of funds by Newman, Hunt, and Co. to build the church at Hermitage Cove – the church of stone. But to many of the families who were living hand-to-mouth by buying from and selling to that same merchant house, to build such a costly structure would have seemed like a heartless waste of money – and in a place so sparsely inhabited. For the few who did visit, it was a high price to pay for such a constructed experience of solemnity, even if they actually felt what the Gothic

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stone was meant to engender. It would have been of much less cost, and much more in tune with their spirituality, if instead the clergy promoted prayer through the Book of Common Prayer that they held dear, and encouraged meditation on the scriptures, such as “the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head” – often like them.33 The feeling of solemnity and the sublime, whether constructed by Gothic architecture or romantic landscape paintings, was partially induced by the unfamiliar, by a sense of being elsewhere. So also, Tractarian liturgy and ritual transported one beyond the mundane, even the crassness, of both the Industrial Revolution and the Protestantism of the Reformation, into a mystery anchored in a romantic mirage of the medieval and patristic past. Thus its charm and veneration. For Feild, the appeal to ancient liturgical provenance in England or the Continent, whether of stone fonts, symbols, or chants, was in itself an irrefutable apologetic for their ironically novel introduction in Newfoundland and Labrador. One therefore could not question “that there should be a Font of Stone in every Church,” since it was “in all our Churches at home the most ancient relic.” Similarly, “Rubrical conformity” in the service was according to “our ancient National Church” and so too with “ancient symbols” and chants of “genuine, approved, ancient Tones.” And as for the principal window of the church and the altar being “to the East … surely its antiquity” declared that it should be so.34 As Pereiro has shown, not just for architecture and liturgy, but also for spirituality, “Antiquity had become an absolute standard and the final court of appeal for the Tractarians; it was the model of the living Church.” Feild himself had been instructed by Charles Lloyd (1784–1829), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, whose “lectures provided the most direct personal influence over the future leaders of the Tractarian Movement, transmitting a sense of the Church of England’s catholic liturgical and patristic heritage.”35 However, there was little impetus to flee to either the medieval or patristic past in Newfoundland. To the average Church of England fisherman and his family, the crassness of the Industrial Revolution was something he may have heard of, but not something he experienced on the headlands in summer or in his tilt in winter. There was just the pure clear air with its resplendent light and the white, white snow. He would have seen the coal-fired steam engine powering a man-of-war visiting the coast in summer, or a mail carrier, but he would not have experienced the “dirty British coaster” noise and ugliness until the 1860s on some of the sealing vessels.36 But of course, the Protestantism of Reformation Anglicanism he held dear. He loved to hear the gospel preached extemporaneously, or read from books of sermons, or from the ubiquitous tracts.37 In contrast, Tractarianism spoke of the gospel in a foreign tongue. In its new articulation of Anglicanism

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only a word or syllable here and there was familiar. And much that was familiar and cherished seemed to have little place in the new religion of saints’ days, lowered pulpits, raised altars, and priestly ways. Feild was attuned to the beauty of nature and on occasion perceived spiritual analogy in it. For example, upon seeing a “glorious” sunrise after being on watch all night while becalmed in a strong tide in Fortune Bay, he exclaimed, “How much more will the true Sun of Righteousness, the true light … reward those who look for His appearing! And when Christ, who is our ‘Light’ shall appear, then shall we also appear with him in glory.”38 Yet God’s presence was not mediated through nature or fellow Christians but through the clergy and their Gothic structures. It is ironic that inner spiritual cultivation was dependent on fabricated spectacle and that the vistas of sea and sky could not answer to the call. People had to look up into a constructed vaulted ceiling instead. This artifice marginalized any devout hearts who would claim a sense of God’s presence in fishing boats, in winter tilts, on the flakes, or at the end of a pitsaw. God could not be present to a fisherman in oil-clothes in the cuddy of a boat like he was to a priest in a surplice ensconced in a chancel. Tractarianism was a program of mediated spirituality that disparaged any who would claim that they could receive God’s grace without his intercession. Tractarian priests would not grant that Protestant fishermen or Methodist missionaries could be servants of God’s grace equal to themselves, and sought to displace them at every turn by denigrating their offerings of service as arrogance and by obtruding themselves into their spirituality. Thus they did not permit a lay person to use his own words in prayer and preaching, but insisted instead that he only read to others those written by a clergyman with the imprimatur of a bishop. Feild and his surpliced clergy spent a lot of time and money going about the island re-baptizing those who had already been baptized according to the requirements of private baptism stipulated in the Prayer Book. Paradoxically he defended the practice as “hypothetical baptism,” which on the surface implied it was less substantial than that offered to God by the people. In this way he disregarded the spiritual service of John Paine at Rocky Harbour by taking all the children he had baptized and baptizing them over again. This man had been offering up his service to God for forty years and Feild, instead of giving him appreciative affirmation, attempted to make over the work that he had done. In displacing John Paine in this way, Feild was driven by his Tractarian sense of his indispensable role as a priestly mediator. Evangelical Anglican ministers would likely have simply thanked him on behalf of the clergy for performing the service in their forty-year absence and reinforced the value of his service by letting it stand on its own.

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Because of the perceived requirement for Gothic theatre, no expense was regarded too high to decorate the receptacle of the holy, whether for stone fonts, stone buildings, silver patens, chalices, and flagons, or expensive tablecloths and vestments, to the neglect of the people as vessels of the Holy Spirit. Fonts had to be of stone.39 Next in importance to the altar itself, the font was made the implement of entry into the Church of England, with the priest standing guard and providing the necessary means. In evangelical and generally priestless Anglican Newfoundland, baptisms were carried out by people as the need arose, and often in private homes. Now baptism had to be performed by the priest, endowed with Apostolic grace and power, and it had to be in church that the people might witness the sacred rite. Since the glory of God became confined almost exclusively to physical objects and ritual, the people themselves became secondary to the structure of church. They were made for the church and not the church for them. Thus Feild could sail through communities of poverty and feel no theological dissonance while comparatively vast sums were spent on the Tractarian apparatus required for the “proper” worship of God. Even the cabin of Feild’s vessel, the Hawk, was a floating display of the “proper arrangements of a church” to those who came on board for service, with such indispensables as ceremonial robes, altar, chalice, and paten, portable font, and lectern. But not surprisingly, no pulpit. At Burnt Islands, Feild flashed them before his local pilot, Robert Eastman, his wife, and her friend with a desired effect – “as the exhibition of King Solomon’s treasures had upon the Queen of the south.”40 Tractarianism thrived on and thirsted for spectacle and theatre, not just as the accoutrements of spirituality, but as its indispensable means. Upon his arrival in St John’s, Feild longed for “a procession with litanies and holy services and priests and choristers” to accompany him as he travelled from the wharf to Government House.41 While in a “procession of boats” on the way to consecrate a graveyard on Pass Island at the entrance to Hermitage Bay, Feild’s boat was the last one behind, and “his Lordship, with robes on, sat in the stern … steering, the clergy on either side in surplices.” Feild was very conscious of the visual impact of his attire. At Englee he wondered what the women “thought and felt at the first sight of a bishop and two clergymen in their canonicals.” At Rose Blanche in a store of the local merchant amid “the dreadful smell of fish and oil,” Feild was pleased with the ephemeral art of a Gothic space constructed with bunting and calico. Within the store his portable altar was positioned under “a canopy … suspended at the east end … In front of the altar hung my piece of bunting, with the sacred monogram, and in front of a small table … hung my bunting, with the mitre … a kind of chancel, or secrarium, formed by linen or cali-

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1.3 A fisherman’s room

co sheets, hung from the roof to the ground. We robed in Mr Quin’s office. I and Mr Jones sat on either side of the altar.”42 Episcopal robes and mitres, priestly surplices, altars and chancels were to the Tractarian clergymen as the sou’wester, trawls, flakes, and stages were to the fishermen – the required paraphernalia of the pursuit of each. But while fishermen knew they could not fish without their gear, many gave loud testimony that spirituality could be attained without the clerical encumbrances. Evangelical Anglicans saw all Tractarian paraphernalia and ceremony as so much clutter. Not only was it theologically dissonant, it diminished the prominence of the pulpit and gospel preaching, much as the cluttered Victorian parlour levelled the visibility of all objects in it, only more so. Hence the uproar with the destruction, rearrangement, and rebuilding of the internal architecture of St Thomas’s and the parish church in St John’s to which Feild so zealously gave his attention immediately upon his arrival. It precipitated his first battle with the people and caused him finally to flee from the field to Bermuda, the other part of his diocese, leaving his lieutenant, Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge (1807–1856), to fend off all aggressors. The people realized that Feild’s interior arrangement and liturgy were designed to make the altar the focal point, not the pulpit. Of course, since Tractarianism as a sacramental theology demoted preaching, it is not coincidental that its material iteration diminished it also. Feild claimed, remarkably, that he did not marginalize preaching, yet he decried its “exaltation” above prayer and Holy Communion. Bishop John Medley at Fred-

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ericton was blunter. He spoke out against the popular “love of mere preaching” in contrast to a lack of appreciation of the choral service. He warned against “the undue stress” that people placed on it, because “the corrupt heart of man always values most that which exalts and pleases self.” And he was controversial in the content of preaching also, replacing conversion with baptism. Medley quoted the archbishop of Canterbury as saying that with “Apostolical Preaching … our Church considers Baptism as conveying Regeneration” and proposed prayer “before Baptism, that the infant may be born again … and to return thanks, after Baptism, that it hath pleased God to regenerate this Infant with his Holy Spirit.”43 Benjamin Cronyn, the evangelical bishop of Huron (Western Ontario), differed markedly from Feild and Medley in his focus on preaching. Speaking against auricular confession and absolution, he said that the main office of a clergyman was that of a messenger preaching the gospel of reconciliation with God through “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He drew attention to the high value that the apostles placed on “the ordinance of preaching … as God’s ordinary means for the conversion of sinners and the edification of the saints.” For a Church of England minister, preaching was “the primary instrument” in his service before God.44 Cronyn’s emphasis on the Protestant message of the gospel, absent in the writings of Feild, is more akin to that of Bishop Hibbert Binney of Nova Scotia. Binney, a milder Tractarian than Feild, spoke against viewing the sacraments as “having a saving power in themselves” and highlighted the importance instead of preaching “Christ crucified” in order to call for “conversion.” How clear the minister preached for the necessity “for the change” determined “the real power of your preaching.” He even declared that “the great feature of the Reformation was the restoration of … justification by faith.”45 Not only did Binney call for a focus on conversion in preaching, he saw preaching as primary in his ministry and clearly enjoyed it. We see this view nuanced in the report of his visit to Cape Breton. For instance, at Louisbourg he “proceeded to deliver an excellent sermon,” and at Main-à-Dieu he preached “in his usual excellent style,” while at Sydney Mines he preached “the very best and most awakening sermon that the writer … ever remembers to have heard.”46 This was quite different from Feild who nearly hid the pulpit in the penumbra of the altar and whose natural gift was administration, not preaching. He later deemed that his coadjutor, Bishop James B. Kelly, was “far better qualified, in most respects, to preach and plead than your humble servant, ‘not eloquent, neither heretofore nor now.’” We see this different emphasis in the accounts of their voyages of visitation. While Feild mentioned preaching, Kelly’s noted incidence of preaching is quite pronounced, for instance, in his 1870 visitation.47

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To remake the Theological Institution [Queen’s College] into a Tractarian cloister was an immediate priority for Feild, since its students were his future lieutenants in the diocese.48 Upon his arrival in St John’s he was not at all pleased when he found that the candidates studying for the ministry in his episcopate were simply attending lectures and “under no surveillance.” He promptly “required them to attend morning prayers daily in the church” and made them subject to “collegiate discipline.” As Frederick Jones stated, the focus of Tractarian colleges was “moral and devotional rather than intellectual,” despite the requirement of Greek and Latin. Spiritual knowledge was not acquired by books and notes alone, but in relationship, by the “personal presence” of the tutor, as John Henry Newman exemplified at Oriel. And neither was it only about intellectual progress; rather, to quote James Pereiro, it required “a moral temper involving openness to God’s action in the soul.” Thus holiness of life was necessary to perceive religious truth. Moreover, this “ethos” was not just a trait of the individual, it had a communal aspect as well. To further it, Feild even wanted to move the college out of St John’s altogether, to the seclusion of Broad Cove (St Phillips).49 Thus Feild keenly wished that a Tractarian principal live with the students and train them by word and example. This meant that the evangelical Charles Blackman had to go. Before Feild left for Bermuda at the end of his second summer, he terminated him. He told Hawkins that Blackman was “neither competent nor careful.” Blackman protested that the only reason the bishop gave him for his dismissal was the poor performance of a student named Saunders. This was particularly galling to Blackman, since he later found out that Feild had deemed the student incapable, and recommended to his father to withdraw him from the college.50 Was Feild disingenuous to Blackman? No doubt Feild wanted a Tractarian principal and found one in Thomas Jones, a graduate of none other than Oxford’s Oriel College itself, as Peter Nockles called it, “truly the cradle, crucible and making of Tractarianism.” And just as Feild wanted, “he will reside with the students.” It was the ideal of the Oxford Movement for the tutor not to just impart knowledge, but, as Newman at Oriel said, to be “‘a moral and religious guardian of the youths committed to him.” Nockles concluded, “Personal presence was a key element in Oxford’s and Oriel’s tutorial system and became a conduit for the dissemination of Tractarian principles.”51 For at least three years Blackman protested to no avail to the spg that his dismissal by Feild was a “vast injustice.”52 If it was, it is the height of irony that Feild committed such an act in order to promote a “moral and devotional” ethos at the college. Feild was dealing with clergy he did not know and had little influence over when he gave his first Charge to them shortly after his arrival in 1844.

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Thus three years later he regretted that his changes “were not so generally accepted by the Clergy as I desired; and partly in consequence” did not gain “on the part of the congregations general approval.” We do not know if any, besides the willing Bridge, actually had Tractarian sympathies. Two years later, prospects did not look hopeful with a roster of such outright evangelicals as John Roberts at Bay de Verde, Johnstone Vicars at Port de Grave, Thomas Boone at Twillingate, William Meek at Sandy Point, and John Marshall at Grole.53 By 1847, nevertheless, Feild was making modest gains. He had dismissed Blackman from the theological college and had installed Thomas Jones, who was ready to foster Tractarian values in such new recruits as William Kepple White, William Rozier, and Cyrus Gathercole. Moreover, the ultra-Tractarian Jacob George Mountain arrived, a graduate of both aristocratic Eton and Merton Colleges, Oxford. Feild depended heavily on such men to represent his wishes in the local missions throughout the large area making up Newfoundland and Labrador. He was present with his clergy only about a week annually when they came to St John’s to his “visitation,” and in their own mission when he arrived every fourth summer or so in the Hawk. What he needed was men who were Tractarian like himself, or sufficiently beholden to him to further his purposes while he was far away. He did not always get the kind of men he wanted. He had to suspend one clergyman, G.B. Carter, in 1847 for once more failing his priest exams and “for other negligence in his duties and particularly in making his collection of fish.” He already had been “much vexed” with Carter for not returning the results of his mission questionnaire that Feild had sent him. Then there was Thomas Appleby, “a very pleasing person,” but a former Baptist who worked as a brewer’s clerk.54 Still, as Feild’s reputation as a Tractarian bishop travelled across the Atlantic and was written up in the London Record for all to see, it likely contributed to his desperation in trying to find missionaries for his diocese. The reported details of his Charges to the clergy, his cathedral consecration, and his rebuff to the Bible Society, for instance, would have made evangelical missionaries leery of venturing out to Newfoundland, especially, as he gained a reputation of being “strict even to severity” and “autocratic and imperious,” and having a “will as an iron bar” to carry out his Tractarian program.55 Instead they would choose such sympathetic dioceses in other colonies as Huron, Sierra Leone, and Sydney, Australia. Some evangelicals who were in Newfoundland had already left, or were looking to leave, such as William Jeynes and John Chapman.56 In his Charges to the Clergy Feild showed that he cared little for popular values, at least in religion. He came to transplant the root of Tractarianism in Newfoundland and if people did not fall into line, he preferred that they just get out of the way. It was not Feild’s way to socialize with people to dis-

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cuss their spiritual ideas. Actually he was rarely with people. He was more an administrator working through his clergymen, largely removed from the daily life of the people he was affecting. While his yacht gave him ease of access to communities, his habit was to stay aboard his vessel aloof from the residents. It served as a cloister with his fellow two or three clergymen on board. Compare his approach with that of Bishop Medley of New Brunswick, who “did not travel with a retinue … Many of his journeys were conducted alone, stopping at humble dwellings, preaching in barns, teaching in schoolhouses, and performing divine services in kitchens.” During Feild’s first trip along the south coast in 1845, which lasted for over two months, he spent only one night ashore. While at Harbour Buffett on his next voyage along the south coast in 1848 the local clergyman was away so he did not come ashore at all but stayed aboard the Hawk the whole day writing letters. Presumably, the recipients of the letters were more important than the people in the harbour. Even when he returned to St John’s he was not eager to leave his vessel. Rather, he slept in his cabin every night “well content with my Church ship.”57 No doubt, in addition to not being fond of people, Feild loved his yacht and loved the sea. Feild was primarily an organizer and mobilizer, and this he could do more efficiently by staying aloof and giving directives as bishop. As a colonial administrator, the project was primary. Listening to people’s needs and spiritual concerns were far down on his list and interests. When he talked with people he generally had an agenda. His approach as he counselled prospective clergy was that they “should know how to direct and employ the mind and will of the people. The presiding mind is more necessary than the helping hand.” For instance, to further the building of a church in Nipper’s Harbour he wrote, “I did what lay in my power to know and be known by the principal people, by receiving and conversing with them in my own cabin after the service.” Similarly, he invited a couple of fishermen “to tea” in his cabin while visiting Red Bay. One of them with “a better education” he was “anxious to employ as Lay Reader and Sunday School Teacher.”58 He assessed people by their ability to contribute to his colonial project. The more “valuable” they were strategically, the more time and attention he gave to them. Of course, he conscientiously ministered as a cleric to individuals from time to time. For instance, while at Recontre West he travelled to New Harbour with his missionary Jacob Mountain to visit a sick child and “gave advice and prayed.” And shortly after Oliver Rouse died at Bay de Verde, he was able to get an unexpected passage there on a steamer and “comfort the sorrowing widow, family, and flock” and take the service the following Sunday.59 He certainly felt that he had little to learn from the people themselves in Newfoundland and Labrador. Bringing an overbearing pretension to the

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colony, he referred to any who opposed his project as “ignorant and excited fishmongers.”60 Similarly, those in congregations who did not go along with his 1844 Order and Uniformity directives were not granted the dignity of having an alternate Anglican spirituality. Instead they were “ill-instructed and ill-disciplined people” who rejected the instructions out of “ignorance and impatience,” while “pious and honest minds” accepted them. He found “great irreligion in wilful and determined resistance” to his Tractarian precepts. He classed all who opposed him as heretics, “grievous wolves” who “will not endure sound doctrine” and go about “speaking perverse things.”61 Ronald Rompkey, in his introduction to a diary of the bishop, drew attention to Feild participating in the general “rhetoric of empire” of the day in which “one culture not only dominates another but interprets it through the hegemonic force of ideas,” whether comparing landscape, buildings, or people to those back home.62 This was quite pronounced in Feild. And “home” for Feild was certainly not Britain, but England, and even there, a narrow culture that preoccupied his associates at Oxford and Cambridge. The Welsh were beyond the pale. The clergyman John Roberts was “ignorant and arrogant.” The Irish were no better. James Purcell, who would later build the Colonial Building, was merely “a supposed builder, an unimaginative Irishman.” The Scots were worse again. J.M. Martine was a “prying, prating, quarrelsome” man. And Americans, though many were direct descendants of the English, simply did not make the grade. Robert Lowell of Boston was just a windbag who “vaunts” and “boasts” of matters that to Feild were patently false. “He is a genuine American … fancies himself a decided Churchman and, among other truly American ways of proving it, has named his dog ‘Chrysostom.’” Practically flinching from recalling his time with both clergymen Martine and Lowell in Conception Bay, Feild wrote, “We want ministers of prudence and deep piety – Englishmen, not Scotch or American.”63 It was Oxford also that gave Feild his theology. Evangelical Anglicans, let alone Presbyterians and Baptists, were hardly intelligible. One of Feild’s worst ecumenical nightmares occurred on the last leg of a voyage from England. Travelling from Halifax to Bermuda he had to spend Holy Week and Easter Sunday confined on a smaller vessel with five Roman Catholics, three Presbyterians, and another “of no particular Church or denomination … but his father was a Methodist, and he is married to a Presbyterian.” His suffering was particularly acute because he had to endure each day “with these, in very close and uncomfortable proximity” and “without any other soul to speak to.” For “fourteen long days this trial endured.”64 Somehow he could not see how his God could be pleased with any in the world, certainly not with any in the British Empire, who did not build with

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Gothic architecture, and who did not worship with Tractarian liturgy and ritual. Everything physical had to be pointed, nothing round, and everything spiritual had to be somber and serious. God could not call any church worship “proper” that did not include chancel, altar, candles, and surplice. Thus all who had not been near Oxford, or near someone who was, were either “ignorant,” mere “fishmongers” needing to be informed, or obstinate in “irreligion” after being granted the privilege and not taking it. This included almost everyone in Newfoundland and Labrador, for very few had been near Oxford, Anglicans or not. Of course, Feild as a Tractarian was not unique in this perspective. Even in the United States, Tractarian poets fantasized about Oxford’s spiritual sensibilities becoming predominant in America. For instance, Arthur Coxe of General Theological Seminary in New York gushed about “England’s old adoring rites, and old liturgic words” in his 1840 Christian Ballads. He rejoiced that “England’s sons and spires are here, and England’s God around.”65 Feild had a lot to do to bring about the proper worship of “England’s God” in Newfoundland and Labrador, and St John’s was the place to begin.

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2 St John’s: “These Ignorant and Excited Fishmongers” The shipping was in great danger and many vessels actually caught; among them the dear Church Ship, and it was only by great and courageous efforts on the part of the mate and Mr Tremlett (just ordained deacon) that it was saved. The fire fell on the foresail, which, though closely clewed up, was burnt, with the yard. A vessel lying along side was seized in a precisely similar manner and was obliged to cut away her mast, by which she and many other ships escaped destruction. The Captain was on shore looking after his wife and goods, as his house was among those which disappeared. Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 12 June 1846, a249, spg The wind was blowing very fresh, as we got under way, and the anchor came home sooner than we expected, and we did not fore-reach soon enough to escape drifting down upon a vessel, which, since our arrival yesterday, had anchored just astern. Her bowsprit came right an end against our mainmast, and her head stove in some of our bulwarks. Fortunately we had a large crew on board, having given passage to St John’s to four men from that very ship. A boat also came from the shore and brought us a kedge anchor, by which we were drawn clear without further damage. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1848, 118–19

Bishop Feild went from one abrupt encounter to another in his debut among the Anglicans of St John’s. That suited him fine. He did not come to the colony to engage a conversation on how he might build on the Anglicanism that was, but to implement a plan already set. Bishop Feild arrived in Newfoundland on 4 July 1844 in a Gothic frame of mind. Hence his revulsion for all things religious upon his entering the harbour. It was not just the feeling of being hopelessly outdone by Bishop Fleming’s “very conspicuous and commanding object” on the brow of the hill overlooking the harbour, a grand Catholic cathedral well under way. A week later he de-

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spaired, “While the Roman Catholics are proceeding rapidly with an immense edifice in a most commanding situation … we have not been able to make a commencement.” Moreover, that Roman Catholic prominence was in an architectural tradition other than Gothic, that “purer and more primitive form.” More significantly for him as bishop, it was that nothing Anglican in St John’s caused him any pleasure. St Thomas’s, the Anglican garrison church, housed neither a preacher nor an architecture that he could stomach. Upon hearing Charles Blackman (1798–1853) preach on the day following his arrival, he judged the evangelical minister to be “bombastic … almost ludicrous” in his style of delivery.1 The church was practically new, having been consecrated less than five years earlier, and not yet ten years old, but it was still built “in those days of ecclesiological darkness.”2 Thus, to Feild, despite its newness, it, like its preacher, was of a repugnant style, and while he might have to tolerate Blackman for the time being, he certainly was not going to put up with the church. He immediately set about tearing down and rearranging its internal architecture. This physical work was of the utmost urgency, for it had to be ready as an exhibit to teach his clergy “the proper arrangements of a church” when they visited in September. Archdeacon Wix had built a “Protestant Episcopal Church,” and while it was outwardly somewhat of “a Gothic box,” its internal architecture made it an unsuitable container for Tractarian verities.3 Yet only so many changes could be made. Nothing could be done, for now, about there being no chancel and no centre aisle. However, the pulpit and reading desk “occupied the centre … obscuring the altar” and moreover, there was no font.4 This would clearly not do, whatever the apparent waste of money in renovating a new church when funds were desperately needed for churches elsewhere. When his clergy arrived, he was able to point out to them that he removed the “large and lofty pile” of a pulpit from the centre and placed it “against a pillar” on the south side of the church, where it no longer “threw all the Services of the Holy Table into the shade.” He placed in the church “a capacious stone font, for the first time” along with “decent alms basins and a silver flagon for the Wine.” He made a few other changes to approximate Tractarian space as closely as possible. Though he charged his clergy peremptorily, “Let there be no galleries” – almost as an eleventh commandment – he had to be content at St Thomas’s with ordering the choir down from them. He also moved the Communion rails forward to have a larger area behind them, still sorely missing a proper chancel.5 Of course, St Thomas’s did not have just a preacher and architecture. It also had people. Did he think that as a bishop he had the right to sail into the harbour, walk up to the church, and trample on their spirituality? They

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were not amused at their most recent colonizer. He stepped onto the edge of a continent over which democratic winds were blowing entirely, a British America vibrant with representative governments, and attempted to reassert hierarchical power, walking into the church as a law of one. We do not know how heated the reaction was to the tearing apart of the front of their church, but we do know that they refused Feild’s request to remove the Communion Table, even though he “objected to it as not being canonical,” and certainly not meeting the Tractarian standard for a raised altar.6 While these renovations were being made at St Thomas’s, the bishop held a vestry meeting and ordered that hammer, mall, and axe be applied to the interior of the “old, ugly, dusty and dismal” parish church of St John’s. The all-encompassing renovations, not just to the front of the church but also to the pews, began on 26 August, not yet two months since his arrival. A few parishioners immediately voiced opposition to this attack, including a member named Gregory, whom Feild sarcastically referred to as “Gregory the Great” and another named McCarty, and his wife, whom he determined were “both eloquent and argumentative but rather too late.”7 He gave none of them any heed. As a writer said eight years later, the changes to the pulpit, reading desk, and pews were all made within four months of his arrival. He had even removed the sounding board that projected the preacher’s voice from the pulpit and placed it above his newly built bishop’s chair. While he brought about the interior changes to the building, their effect was not to enhance Tractarian solemnity but instead to “to outrage the feelings of the people.” The anonymous writer quoted Psalm 74 comparing Feild’s actions at both churches to the high-handed destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians. And then he was gone. He just left. He sailed for Bermuda, that other part of his diocese, leaving his commissary Thomas Bridge to suffer the winter in charge of his affairs in Newfoundland.8 But all was not well. Specifically, although he informed the vestry of the changes he planned and carried out at St John’s Church, there is no record of any meeting with the people themselves. Neither is there at St Thomas’s. He did clearly state his interior architectural and liturgical wishes for the diocese to the clergy, but this was a charge written to them alone. The people were ignored. But neither did the 1844 Charge give even the clergy a spiritual and theological explanation for the sudden change in most things Anglican. Feild was like a captain ordering that the vessel be re-rigged, without allowing a word of discussion about where they were sailing. But all knew the destination. The Charge gave meticulous detail, to the point of fastidiousness, requiring exact Tractarian ritual, such as facing east while praying, yearning

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for “the benefit and beauty of the Chancel” for the priest to perform the “Holy Mysteries” ritual, and barring its presence, the absolute necessity for the pulpit to be moved to the side so that the Holy Table is given unobstructed prominence in order that the people with fixed intent may earnestly look upon it. In contrast the pulpit was “by no means the most essential or first requisite in a Church. Any Clergyman … may very fitly and properly” do without it. Having a font in the church was of far more importance. Sacred vessels should be of silver. All was to be approached with “awe and reverence.” The command to announce all fast-days was to be “punctually obeyed.” Priests must wear the surplice. Baptism, that second most necessary sacrament, was given heightened importance in the church service. Probably most important to evangelical Anglicans was what was missing. As the editor of the London Record remonstrated, “The sum and substance of this primary address of the Bishop to his colonial clergy – is form and ceremony. Twenty-eight principal pages with scarcely one word of Gospel doctrine.”9 It was within the Church of England only that Feild caused all this tumult and commotion. He had entered a harbour of relatively placid Anglican waters in St John’s and left it four months later in a tempest. He had taken by storm a people reasonably content with their worship and left them momentarily flapping in the winds, dealing with changes they neither asked for nor wanted. He was like a northeaster when it first strikes the land, which, as Feild quoted the fishermen, “always comes, as they say, with the butt end first.”10 The people no doubt made an immediate connection between Feild’s architectural and liturgical changes and Tractarianism, since they were already alerted to the movement in England. In the year before Feild’s arrival, the Patriot reported the transatlantic news that Edward Pusey (1800–82) held such beliefs as baptismal regeneration and transubstantiation.11 On 1 August 1843 the Public Ledger informed its readers that Pusey had appeared before a private tribunal to defend himself against the charge that he held doctrine opposed to the Church of England. A little over a week later it reprinted a recent warning from a Liverpool newspaper alerting Protestants that Tractarian or Puseyite changes to the Church of England had caused “considerable pain” to Protestants in general and Anglicans in particular by approximating in its extreme form “that which is idolatrous.” The error of the Oxford Movement was in not seeing that “mere forms, rites, and ceremonials may be overestimated to the great detriment of true religion.” In September, an article attempting to define Puseyism noted that it was a move away from Protestantism and a leaning toward Roman Catholicism, with such beliefs and practices as calling the communion table an altar, placing candles on it, preaching in the surplice, ob-

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serving saints’ days, and adhering to the doctrine of the Real Presence. In November there was a further warning against “the Oxford Tracts.”12 Moreover, Church of England parishioners in the general Protestant ecumenicity of St John’s would also have been warned of Tractarianism through their Methodist associates. The Methodist Magazine was widely circulated in Newfoundland, and the 1842 edition of the bound monthly copies carried over thirty warnings against “Puseyism.”13 Though abruptly knocked off-balance by Feild, the parishioners soon gained their feet, and before long Bridge had more than the winter to contend with, as the St John’s Church congregation grew into “a very perturbed state.” It was not just the connection the parishioners made between Feild’s architectural renovations and Tractarianism. Bridge, true to his bishop, though far away in Bermuda, enforced Tractarian ritual during the services. During a great showdown with Bridge in February, the congregation rejected the innovations “by a unanimous vote.” A churchwarden threatened to resign if Bridge continued the ritual. People were walking out of the church up to Good Friday, 21 March 1845. Feild decided it was their “proximity to America” that gave them such popular “notions of interference and resistance.” He was indeed surprised and shocked at the degree to which the people resisted his orders and, forgetting the peace and calm under Spencer, concluded they were “not yet prepared for a Bishop,” unless he meant for a real bishop. He also thought that Protestants may be oversensitive to authority because they had seen how Catholic priests rule – “They do indeed carry things with a high hand.”14 Perhaps America was having an influence. John Henry Hopkins (1792– 1868), bishop of Vermont, and “a friend of the Reformation,” had published Novelties Which Disturb Our Peace the previous year, in which he addressed the place of rebaptism, use of the term Church, and the doctrine of the Real Presence in “Tractarian theory.” He argued for the historic recognition of lay baptism by the Church of England, for it was only Tractarians who claimed it was invalid because it was non-apostolic. Moreover they claimed that the clergy of Dissenters were non-episcopal, therefore their baptisms were merely lay also, and thus Tractarians had a fondness, and even zeal, for rebaptizing. In many cases they called it hypothetical baptism, a misuse of the form, since it was meant to satisfy doubts, not about lay baptism, but about whether the “the person had received Baptism at all.” In addition, Tractarians restricted the word Church to the Church of England and excluded Dissenters because of their mistaken theory that “there can be no Church where there is no Episcopacy.” But episcopacy had to do with the order of church government, and not with the essence of the church. Dissenter was a legal term for those outside the Established Church according

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to the law in England, but Tractarians had erroneously introduced the “novelty” of using it for “those who dissent from episcopacy, as established by the law of God,” thus claiming that other Protestants were not part of “the Church.” Finally, by their doctrine of Real Presence, they claimed that the elements were converted at consecration by a priest into Christ’s “actual and real Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity,” regardless of the faith of the communicant, instead of being converted into “holy Symbols” that became “the Body and Blood of Christ” by the Holy Spirit only “to the faithful Communicant.” Thus the Tractarian view was essentially that of transubstantiation, if not in name. These views were “novelties,” not because they were new ideas, but because they were recently introduced in such a way “as to disturb our peace by their practical influence.”15 A contemporary writer agreed with Feild that people were firmly opposing him in St John’s. He stated that before Feild arrived, the Church of England in Newfoundland was characterized by “Evangelical Doctrines,” the preaching of the Gospel, and “peace and harmony.” This was the case at the St John’s Church. When Feild made his interior architectural changes, parishioners were upset but did not protest until driven to the extremity, as Bridge followed through with his bishop’s Tractarian ritual. Finally, “the whole congregation” had no alternative but “to rise … to protest” against the innovations. Although he appeared to agree to return to the status quo before his arrival, the bishop had since determinedly introduced “almost every Tractarian practice and doctrine that is taught or practiced.”16 Thus people’s resistance was less in response to their “proximity to America” as a land of rebellion, and more to the bishop’s violation of their spiritual values, for there was similar opposition in England. In fact, local newspapers added to the anti-Tractarian fervour of the St John’s parishioners in the winter of 1845 by republishing similar instances of controversy from English newspapers. In February, the very month that the meeting of the St John’s Church “unanimously” rejected the Tractarian innovations made to their worship, the Public Ledger published a Charge to the Clergy of Henry Pepys (1783–1860), the evangelical bishop of Worcester, in which he drew attention to the period immediately preceding publication of the Oxford Tracts. Pepys noted that it was a time of preaching “the great truths of the everlasting gospel,” of devotion, of peace between laity and clergy, and of generous giving by the former to the church and to panProtestant missionary societies. The Tractarians destroyed all that. Their liturgical changes and focus on reviving obsolete rituals had done nothing but “alienate” the people from their clergy so that only “discord and dissension” remained. At one time wearing a surplice while preaching had little significance, but it had now become “the badge of a party.” Thus when

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clergy wore it, they raised a Tractarian flag in the face of their Reformation Anglicans and violated their piety and zeal. Pepys’s charge to the clergy was that they should not be taken up with ritualistic “trifles” but, on the contrary, be “anxious only to win souls to Christ,” the major focus of the Church of England since the Reformation. “Episcopus” of St John’s wrote the editor a week later to agree with Pepys in “paying due regard to the sentiments of the laity,” saying that the clergy should not engage in “the fruitless efforts to interfere with the accustomed order of the people.”17 News from England continued to arrive bolstering the congregations of St John’s Church and St Thomas’s in their resistance to Bishop Feild and his ecclesiastical commissary, Thomas Bridge. Nineteenth-century Newfoundland was not remote on the edge of a continent, but centre-stage, midway to North America in a transatlantic world. Travel and news moved relatively quickly, with English newspapers carried to Newfoundland and items from them reprinted in St John’s, often within three weeks of publication in England. The Public Ledger reported that the diocese of Henry Phillpotts, the Tractarian bishop of Exeter, was in an “uproar,” because he insisted that the preacher must wear a surplice in the pulpit to attain liturgical uniformity. In response, “in scores of parishes the congregations walked out of church in a body. In every town large and furious meetings of protest were held. In Exeter some of the clergy were mobbed as they left the church.” Five weeks later, bending to popular pressure, “the Bishop withdrew his order.” And in London, when Bishop Blomfield pressed for surplices in his diocese, a whole congregation at Ealing walked out. The eleven parishes of Islington simply told the bishop that his wishes could not be obeyed. Meanwhile, in the Jamaican Times, Bishop Spencer, the former evangelical bishop of Newfoundland, warned his clergy against the inroads of Tractarianism, which “threatened the corruption of the Church” back in England.18 Bishop Feild did not enter into the conundrum of having two bishops, both with apostolic authority, so radically diverging in their assessment of what was correct doctrine for the Church of England. Matters in St John’s had been whipped up to such a pitch that “the whole parish was in a fearful state of commotion and ready for an explosion” when Bishop Feild returned in May and rescued his besieged but loyal lieutenant, Bridge. The bishop met with the people immediately and gave in to all contested points but one – the wearing of the surplice instead of the black gown while preaching – that emblem of emblems of Tractarianism.19 In a later Charge to the Clergy he stated that he was not sorry for his instructions of 1844, or their results. He still wanted them to be carried out, for people in their resistance were simply “ill-instructed and ill-disciplined.” Yet he was “far from presuming to censure” any who did

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not. At risk of appearing disingenuous, he told the clergy that his giving in to the congregation of the St John’s Church was only a tactical move because of their “sudden and strenuous opposition,” which was inflamed by newspapers, such as the report of the Public Ledger that Anglicans in Exeter had emptied the pews over the surplice. Once again in the fall of 1845 he gauged that “the feeling towards the Church and towards me is so bad in St John’s, that I think the most prudent thing I can do at present is to retire for a time” to Bermuda. Because there was such robust opposition to his innovations, even transatlantic – not only in St John’s but also in the press in England – Feild said that he had “allowed concessions contrary to my own views.” He had pulled rank as bishop but had run out of leverage, for according to his own statements he had also overestimated his control over his clergy. Unlike Bridge, several of them had either followed their own theological beliefs or had given in to those of local congregations and thus had not followed the directives he had given them, which now he classed as his “wishes and recommendations – nothing more.”20 Feild was fortunate in having Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge to carry out his wishes and to take care of his administrative duties at St John’s. Feild, spending the majority of his winters in Bermuda and his summers sailing around Newfoundland and Labrador, had much less time and energy to spend in his episcopal seat. Yet there is some question whether Bridge was truly Tractarian or merely rolling with the latest theological wave. In his Three Sermons, printed in 1839, he spoke with an evangelical tongue: “Let us, then, consider whether we are yet in our sins – still ‘alienated from God … ’ or, ‘hath the Father delivered us from the power of darkness, and translated us into the Kingdom of His dear Son,’ enabling us to believe the ‘faithful saying … that CHRIST JESUS came into the world to save sinners;’ and preparing us to meet, in the peaceful confidence which nothing but that record, received into the heart, can inspire.”21 Bishop Spencer had made Bridge rector of the parish church of St John’s in 1840, then sent him to England to raise money for his cathedral and to study. Bridge returned in 1841 not only with cathedral funds but also with an ma from the University of Oxford, the seat of Tractarianism.22 How much did he subscribe to the Oxford Movement? On his return he was appointed bishop’s commissary, and in the same year he became superintendent of the evangelical Newfoundland School Society.23 Yet Feild noted that Bridge was wearing the surplice, that badge of Tractarianism, at church services before his arrival in Newfoundland in 1844.24 Three years later, when Peter Winser of Aquaforte converted to Roman Catholicism, he told Bridge that he converted from Protestantism. Bridge replied, that “Protestant as I am …

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I declare I do not know what you mean, or what is meant, by ‘the Protestant Church.’” The Church of England was not part of the Protestant Church and its “numberless other sects.”25 Frederick Jones judged that Bridge was opportunistic, being neither sincerely evangelical at first, nor sincerely Tractarian later. Actually, it appears that he was genuinely converted at Oxford, and when he failed in his attempt to become bishop, he was at least one clergyman in Newfoundland who was waiting for a Tractarian bishop like Feild to come along.26 No doubt Feild would have been much less effective without him during his first decade, possibly altogether ineffective. Feild, not trusting him at first, began to realize how indispensable Bridge was during his long absences, a loyal, assiduous, and effective deputy. Before a year had passed, he was referring to him as his “Iron Bridge.” At his premature death, Feild said he had lost “his eye and his hand” and called him “as faithful, laborious, and devoted a Missionary, as any Society ever sent out.”27 Feild did not remain in St John’s for long after he returned from Bermuda on 10 May 1845 and was off again on 16 July, this time to the south coast, returning in the last week of September, and then off to Bermuda again in December.28 But while in port he made a strategic move for his Tractarian program in October, which, while it had some effect on parishioners in St John’s, was to have a large impact on Anglicans in the outports. Exercizing an administrative change, Feild attempted a much greater leverage over people and clergy through the Newfoundland Church Society (ncs), and once again, Bridge was his right-hand man. The Church Society was a voluntary organization formed by Edward Wix in 1837 through which Anglicans helped churches in the diocese at large.29 Bridge, secretary to the ncs, reported in 1840 that the amount required to be paid annually to be constituted a member of the Society was ten shillings, firming up the rules of the Society. The contributions would help pay for missionary salaries, church buildings, and schools “in connection with the church.”30 Feild took this avenue of voluntary offerings, and with much aplomb and great resolve mobilized a group to turn the society into an agency for compulsory church giving. Governor John Harvey (1778–1852) gave the keynote address to the ncs on 15 October, calling for “zeal and unanimity” in relieving locally the spg “from a portion at least” of the increasing costs associated with supporting the Church of England throughout the colonies of North America. In order to carry out this objective, the “desultory efforts” of the past had to be abandoned and replaced with “some trifling annual contribution … paid with undeviating punctuality.” The “punctuality” in payment required from “every adult member” was more important than the amount, which the

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governor assured those attending that, without “any undue pressure … even the very poorest individual” could afford. That assurance bordered on the preposterous. His annual salary of £3,000 made him an unlikely judge of anything the poor could or could not do. Bryan Robinson (1808–87), on a salary of £650 from the government as an assistant judge, which was only one of his incomes, felt qualified to speak on behalf of the poor also, and mused that it should be “one dollar a year.” He moved that everyone should be taken up with “the urgent necessity … for increasing exertions … of all members of the Church throughout the Colony,” not just in St John’s, in order that the money be collected. The now compulsory fund was under the control of the bishop, who would apportion it where he deemed it was needed for building churches and schools, and for paying clergy and teacher salaries.31 It was not made public that Feild refused Governor Harvey’s offer to ask the Colonial Office for a grant of £700 to help support the Church of England in the colony, taking a highly inconsistent stand, given that he allowed the Church in Bermuda, both clergy and property, to be funded almost totally by the state. Possibly, he did not want to be beholden to evangelicals at the Colonial Office.32 Feild did believe that “wealthy merchants” who had profited “by the produce of these teeming seas … drawn forth, of course, under God’s blessing, by the labour of fishermen” had a duty to contribute. “It is not to be believed that Christian men will be content to accumulate wealth in or from a country for the aggrandizement of families or enlargement of an estate, without being willing, nay desirous, to bestow, of that wealth for the glory of the Giver, and the good of the people through whose labour they have so been enriched.” This obligation was not just on merchants in Newfoundland, for when it came to business in Newfoundland and Labrador, “the wealth which is drawn from the Seas is almost entirely … conveyed to England, Scotland, and Ireland, where the merchants live.” A writer from Jersey agreed with Feild: “As so much of the wealth of the residents in this island and in Guernsey has been drawn from the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery and commerce, that diocese and that Mission have especial claims upon us, who cannot see the names of the merchants on the wharves and counting-houses here, without being reminded of the principal establishments on those Transatlantic shores.”33 But of course while Feild could demand money from the fishermen on pain of withdrawal of services, he had no such leverage over the merchants. Their contributions remained voluntary, and rare. Bishop Feild, just back from his voyage in the Hawk, from as far west as Bay St George, gave many “distressing” examples of need for clergymen and schoolmasters, emphasized that there was no longer hope of a larger grant

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from the spg, and stated his totally agreement with the governor. Two weeks later he sent a Circular Letter to all his clergy agreeing with the governor once again in his call for an annual “systematic” collection to support the Church and stating that “all right-minded members … both lay and Clergy” would agree with the necessity. While all this was well and good, what was wanting was “proper and effective machinery,” and this is where the clergy came in: “they must carry it into operation,” hence the reason for the circular letter. Since this “plan” had been approved by the Committee of the Church Society, each clergyman was responsible to collect “5s. a-year … per head, from each and every Church member, old and young,” and forward the money to the Church Society. “All must be returned to me, or the Treasurer of the Church Society,” Thomas Bridge. None of the money was to come from pew rents, which members were now no longer required to pay. Two duplicate forms for records were being sent, one of which was to be provided “to me for inspection.” Clergy could enlist the help of “influential and respectable friends,” “Merchants and Planters,” and churchwardens, but the responsibility rested on them. It was their “sacred duty” to see that the money was collected, to write up the report, and to send the money to St John’s to the ncs. Furthermore, “all other collections for, or payments to the clergyman, must … altogether cease.”34 No longer requiring local pew rents, but requiring all church members to send their dues to the Church Society in St John’s, was an attempt to suddenly shift power from parishes and their clergy to the bishop himself. The people in the outports were told to no longer give their church offerings to the local church and minister. Clergymen were now to receive their salary from Feild through the society. Thus Feild no longer just hired them, he also paid them. This point would become even more critical when he took action that resulted in spg clergy salaries being cut in half, for they would have to look to the Church Society to make up the difference. Since the local parish church was not permitted to pay the piper, Feild could call the tunes. Several churches saw what was coming and baulked. They could see that the ncs was ruled by a St John’s committee, largely of St John’s merchants and lawyers, with names such as C.F. Bennett and J.M. Rendell, with Bridge as secretary carrying out Feild’s wishes. There was no effective representation from the outports. No one in Harbour Grace, Bonavista, Twillingate, or Burin had any say in this new “plan” for paying the church. And while the Church Society agreed in principle to systematic giving toward church support, Feild’s operational “plan” was agreed to only by himself and the management committee of St John’s merchants and lawyers. This elite simply declared that local pew rents and local church giving were void, and de-

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manded instead that every member of the Church of England in the outports send five shillings “per head” to St John’s to the Church Society. They did not consider how they might help “even the poorest” but instead calculated what they might “exact” from them. In this high-handed way as metropolitan brokers, they made a grab for power to exert their influence and control over what they regarded as their religious hinterland. It was Feild’s idea, and they readily agreed. He had mentioned in his diary his desire for “arrangements, of a more systematic kind … for collecting money” a month after he arrived in Newfoundland.35 As an administrator, for a show of support, he garnered apparent advocacy from the governor, from the Church Society, and actual endorsement from a “respectable” committee in St John’s in an attempt to give his tax plan weight, especially in the outports. The governor, bishop, and other St John’s elite thereby deprived people of the Protestant Christian principle of giving donations freely from the heart as a response to God’s grace. Bishop Feild never had the faith to believe that people giving out of love for God would provide him with enough funding for his projects. Giving freely – what Governor Harvey called “desultory” giving and the bishop of Exeter “spasmodic charity” – had to be replaced with an annual fee, demanded and paid “punctually,” to the hierarchy of the church.36 And Feild needed money, for he had costly projects, since Tractarianism was a high-priced religion. The two churches in St John’s, one practically new, had already undergone the expense of a retrofit to more closely approximate the requirements of the new spiritual aesthetic. And this renovation had to be duplicated in all the churches on the island. And they all had to be furnished with expensive stone fonts, fine altar cloths, and silver chalices. The people did not ask for this, in many cases did not even want it, but were required by the bishop to pay for it to provide him with what he thought was necessary with his Tractarian understanding of God. In most cases they had no such understanding themselves, being more generally Protestant, and when they perceived what he was up to, in many cases refused to pay, not out of a lack of generous giving, but in protest. Furthermore, they did not like the high-handed tactics of Feild and his St John’s friends telling them they could no longer pay pew rents locally. Feild’s arm was also weak, because many clergy were paid by the spg and felt little pressure to conform. Two years later there were still ten missions, such as Harbour Grace and Carbonear, that collected no money at all for the Church Society. These were named and shamed in the 1847 annual report.37 Funds were still less forthcoming as people began to see payments to the Church Society as a means of extending Tractarian control over them. Feild’s biographer stated that through this demand “his popularity was shipwrecked among Anglicans.”

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But still, in 1845 Feild laid a foundation stone of funding throughout his diocese that would not be dislodged.38 The plan was nearly wrecked from the start by poverty. In the late 1840s when Feild attempted to vigorously enforce the “punctual” payment plan, many people simply did not have the money to give. They were poor. Many were very poor. It is difficult to understand how Feild could still demand payment. Yet when Martin Blackmore, the clergyman at Burgeo, pleaded the penury of the people in 1848 as the reason for not being able to send more money, Feild, writing from a steamer on his way to Bermuda, summarily dismissed both Blackmore’s assessment and sentiment: “I do not agree with him as to the increased poverty of his people. And I must quite disallow what he seems to insinuate that his people cannot, or ought not to, subscribe more than the sixteen pounds he has collected. They can and ought to subscribe much more; and if our Clergy were prepared to deal with the people, (or obliged to) as the Roman Catholic Clergy do, we might raise five, six or in some cases ten times more than at present.” While he did acknowledge the “sad destitution” in the colony in his 1849 circular to the clergy, he still urged them “to pursue and promote to the utmost the plan of general collections propounded by the Church Society.”39 Where was that “kind, generous, hearty nature, and … sympathy with all poor men” advocated by a contemporary best-selling author?40 He appeared to be so removed from the people in his architectural mission, so encapsulated religiously in the chancels of Tractarianism, so cloistered as he travelled about in the Hawk, practically quarantined from the people in his religiosity, that he did not feel their poverty, certainly not in a way meaningful enough to cause him to release them from his financial obligation. In his extensive journals of his 1848 and 1849 visitations along the coast he did not dwell on the near Lazarus-like poverty of the people at all; he hardly mentioned it. He expressed little concern, whether empathy or sympathy. Yet their utter destitution was carried extensively in the press. The Royal Gazette, for instance, reported, “We continue to receive from various parts of the Colony, painful accounts of destitution among a considerable portion of the inhabitants. From Placentia Bay, St Mary’s Bay, Ferryland District, Conception Bay, Trinity Bay, Notre Dame Bay, appeals are being poured in upon the Government.” It was widely known that the government was sending barrels of Indian meal by the hundreds to the people to stave off the prospect of starvation.41 They could not afford a “widow’s mite,” let alone the now huge “trifling” amount spoken of by the governor, deemed to be a dollar or ten shillings per man and wife by the bishop and his merchant enclave. But Feild had bigger plans that would require not shillings but thousands of pounds. Every squire had his manor, and every bishop must have his

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cathedral, and it had to be prominent. Before he ever set foot in Newfoundland, and less than two weeks after he was consecrated bishop, he outlined purposes for an ecclesiastical fund for Newfoundland and he deemed a cathedral “the first and most pressing want.”42 He had frustrations in getting it. First, the planned site was simply in the wrong place. Feild wished that it was situated on the commanding St Thomas’s location overlooking the city instead of being nearly out of sight down over the hill.43 Second, he had to deal with the fledgling attempt at a cathedral by Bishop Spencer. When he saw the drawings, so contrary to his more demanding Gothic sensibilities, he dispensed with the “frightful structure” abruptly.44 Call that a cathedral! Fortunately all he had to deal with from the previous effort was a pile of cut stone from Ireland to somehow place into the new structure. Disgusted, and not having an alternative, he found the whole prospect “dark and disheartening.” A month later he was still despondent, looking at the cost even of making do with Spencer’s unsatisfactory design: “Here is a pretty colonial mess, out of which at present I cannot see how to escape.”45 Little did he know that his deliverance would come in less than a year by the tragic event of “a furious and fatal fire,” which left “the principal part of the town … a mere forest of tall naked chimneys frightful to behold.”46 A writer to the Ecclesiologist marvelled at how fortunate the fire was for Bishop Feild. It not only destroyed the stone and other materials of the planned “sham Gothic conventicle,” Bishop Spencer’s hopeless attempt at a cathedral, but also destroyed the St John’s parish church, “a wooden shed of the most monstrous description.”47 Thus it extended to him both a clean slate upon which to build his new cathedral and an impetus to raise a significant portion of the immense funds required for such an edifice. What he needed now was an architect and a design. Tractarianism was a Gothic religion, and this cathedral had to be the most succinct and most expansive reification of its essence in Newfoundland. There was a lot at stake. Not only did it have to be a showpiece of the new Church of England, it also had to provide an alternate focal point in the city to that other cathedral on the brow of the hill – even more monumental, and inducing the awe that only Gothic could engender. He settled on Camden George Gilbert Scott to provide the edifice – one sufficiently massive and with English articulation. His imagined cathedral made it to the pages of the Illustrated London News 23 June 1849, placed with imposing effect on a deceptively level landscape. The reality was much less. As Robert McCrea noted on his visit to the city a decade or so later, it was situated halfway up a steep slope, which severely disadvantaged it. Not only did it have the Roman Catholic cathedral “towering above” it, it also looked “lopsided and ungainly” along the side of the hill. The effect upon entering the Narrows

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was less that of a cathedral and more that of a “long, blank, buttressed wall for a military storehouse.”48 After all the stonework and extravagant outlay of funds, it didn’t even rise to the stature of a “glorious gray pile.” “What – no tower?” And irony of ironies, no chancel. Did that mean that it was a failure? Even the Ecclesiologist judged that the design was lacking in originality, though “scrupulously correct,” and therefore “deficient in … moral feeling.” Because it was “so plain,” it had to depend upon the “dignity of mass and a decided outline” to “screen the exterior from meanness.”49 After burrowing through £16,000 pounds, all that Feild had to show for it was not a cathedral, but the nave of a cathedral, and that not even finished, laying himself open to that caveat of his master: “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it.” Rumblings from the secretary of state, Lord Grey’s office in London, were heard that “two good Stone Churches might have been built for that money.”50 The complaints were nothing compared to the screams heard in St John’s four years earlier, before even the cornerstone was laid. It was really a battle over human decency, whether it was acceptable to bypass the poor, thousands of them, made bereft by the fire even of homes to live in, and to build, instead, a grand edifice to encapsulate and exhibit the religious notion of a few, that is, to architecturally transplant Gothic Anglicanism in Newfoundland. As one person at the Colonial Office observed, a “time of distress is no time for building cathedrals at £15,000.”51 The tiny enclave of the Committee of the Church Society – Feild and Bridge, and a few of the merchants, lawyers, and clergy – may have experienced no pangs of conscience over the matter, but the vast majority saw it as a shameful outrage committed against the poor. Maybe that was why William Grey had to admit in 1853, after the nave was consecrated, that it was “the doing of our noblehearted Bishop alone. The building is quite unappreciated by the majority of persons here.”52 The mayor of London headed up an appeal for the “the sufferers by the recent fires at St John’s” and a Queen’s letter was obtained in support. Feild, not long back from Bermuda in late May, was on a visitation to the northeast coast when his commissary received news of the appeal. Bridge was horrified. All the money going to the sufferers, who were mostly Catholic, and none for the cathedral!53 Feild was equally so. Hardly in the harbour long enough to turn around, he was off to England in the Hawk to market a claim for his cathedral, to gain an audience with Lord Grey and persuade him to apportion at least half of the collection to it. He nearly drowned on the way in a gale. The Hawk “lost her mainsail, gaff, topmast, and staysail;

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her bulwarks and toprail were started in several places, and one gangwaydoor was washed away” – as was his reputation. Yet his venture was quite successful. Of the £29,000 collected, Feild was able to claim over £14,000 for his cathedral.54 Frederick Jones argued that “Feild’s part in the whole affair was entirely honourable.” He had already intended to solicit funds for a cathedral. The appeal mentioned both “relief of the sufferers and the rebuilding of the episcopal church,” though Lord Grey at the Colonial Office mentioned only “the sufferers” in official correspondence. The Relief Committee in St John’s had already paid “the sufferers” and had a surplus. There was plenty of work for “the sufferers” in rebuilding. Roman Catholics in St John’s, the majority of “the sufferers,” sent at the time £500 to help famine victims in Ireland. Petitions for relief were “easy to produce” because most of the people were illiterate. The poor in St John’s were better off than other parts of the empire.55 Such self-justifying arguments used by Feild, Bridge, and coterie, however, did not convince the Roman Catholic population. It was evident that Feild had received over £14,000 to replace a building worth £400, what he himself had called a “mean and miserable” church.56 The Patriot, a Catholic newspaper with a Presbyterian editor, repeatedly pointed out the injustice and called for restitution of the funds. Flare-ups continued for years. As late as 1850 it was still reporting how the fire fund was “wantonly and wickedly … defrauded.”57 But Protestants too were outraged over the injustice. At the Public Ledger, Henry Winton published editorials and letters with a similar refrain. For example, on 29 June 1847 he stated, “The original and exclusive motive to all the contributions was the relief of the sufferers by the fire” and went on to quote from the London Times to show that this was the case. It was not just Anglicans who gave to the fund. Dissenters also gave and they gave to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and provide them homes, not to build cathedrals.58 Feild’s grasping for the fire funds revealed the temper of his metal and his priorities, even more than his requirement of the poor that their annual fees to the church be “paid with undeviating punctuality.” It showed the people what they were resisting in their opposition to him. The cause Feild held dear was his Tractarian mission, and everything else was a distant second, whether the cries of the poor, the salaries of clergy, or people’s beliefs. All had to be sacrificed to the stone-and-mortar cathedral, the bishop’s seat, which loomed so largely in his imagined universe. He did stop momentarily to wonder if it was “right to spend such an enormous sum on the material temple, while bodies and souls are starving for lack of necessary food.” He thought of St Wulstan (ca. 1008–95), who pondered whether he should

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2.1 British and Foreign Bible Society publication, 1813

be piling up stones to the neglect of people’s souls. He put a firm hand to the trowel and pressed on.59 What was giving strength to his arm? Certainly Tractarian zeal, but not just that. There was a marked spiritual rivalry. Whether in the carriage upon his arrival, or looking up the hill as he re-

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peatedly walked from St Thomas’s to St John’s Church, or sailing through the Narrows in the Hawk, he was always confronted with that blasted Roman Catholic cathedral “towering” over his head. Its “commanding” stature against the skyline challenged not just his fragile attempts at building but his very episcopacy itself. Such a categorical Roman Catholic statement had to receive an Anglican rejoinder in stone. But just as much, Irishness had to be answered with Englishness, no matter how much a minority of the population. Six days before the fire, Bishop Feild took another action that caused much scratching of heads and consternation in St John’s. At the formation of a local branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society for which Governor Sir John Harvey had agreed to be patron, Feild had been invited to be president. He not only refused, but printed his refusal in the newspaper. He said that such a society in Newfoundland was not “requisite or desirable.” The main supporters of the Bible Society were Dissenters, who claimed that they were separated by only “unimportant differences.” In this way, Feild said, they showed “a disregard of the distinctive character of the Church, as the body to which … truth is intrusted.” The result was that the society appeared to give legitimacy to “the system of dissent” and lowered the proper position of “the Church.”60 In this rejection of the Bible Society he consistently acted according to his view stated the year before in his Bermuda Charge to the Clergy declaring that voluntary societies were “self-formed” and therefore have “no foundation.” He called upon his clergy to speak out against “such inventions of men.”61 People in St John’s and elsewhere were so appalled at his attitude and rejection of the Bible Society that his biographer concluded that among Protestants it “utterly destroyed for him all chance of popularity for some years.” He went on to state that Feild had “utter contempt” for “popularity” anyway. “Popularity” was actually a trifling word to use in that context.62 What Feild lost was respect. Wesleyans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians could not accept his exclusionist views. Evangelical Anglicans were embarrassed. They all agreed that while they differed over forms of church government, what was central was “the glorious gospel.” Thus, with exceptions, there had been a history of mutual respect, communication, and fellowship.63 The Wesleyans had greeted Bishop Spencer on his arrival, and he replied that, though the Church of England differed from them “in some particulars,” they were both “conscientiously engaged in promoting the great and vital truths of Christianity.” The Protestant clergy continued to attend one another’s events, preaching and fellowshipping in each other’s churches. For example, the Congregationalist D.D. Evans preached at the Wesleyan Chapel. St Andrews pre-

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sented a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to William Faulkner, the Wesleyan minister, on his departure.64 And the Presbyterians and Wesleyans showed up to support the Congregationalists at the laying of the cornerstone for their new chapel.65 They worked together in the Congregationalist London Missionary Society, the Wesleyan Missionary Society, and the Anglican Newfoundland School Society. And they continued to cooperate in the Bible Society. An Anglican, William Thomas, was its president. Another Anglican, Robert Prowse, was on the Bible Society Committee with the Congregationalist Joseph Noad, and the Presbyterian James Seaton. They assisted Methodist missionaries such as John Peach at Burin and Elias Brettle in Fortune Bay.66 Their attitude was probably best described in the monthly Newfoundland Guardian, which stated in its first issue, “There is but one centre of unity – the Lord Jesus Christ – that all the sects of the Protestant Church differ only in ceremonial details, and that they agree in all that is vital, permanent and precious.”67 The following year the “different Protestant Communions” invited Feild to cooperate in funding a vessel in St John’s harbour as “a ‘Bethel’ or Mariners’ Church.” He categorically rejected for himself and his diocese such an “admixture or interchange of views and services in the public worship of God.”68 Feild dismissed their fellowship of “the Gospel” and replaced it with “the Church,” that is the Church of England, his Gothic vision of it, and in that way divided a Protestant community that had been reasonably ecumenical in its interrelationships. Thus in two short years in Newfoundland, Feild had squandered the goodwill he had inherited upon his arrival as the episcopal successor of the popular Bishop Spencer, when people greeted him as he rode the streets in Lady Harvey’s carriage.69 He had alienated the Anglicans of St John’s with his Tractarian changes to the interior architecture and services. He had sounded the first note of anger in the outports with his demand for church fees and that they be paid not locally but sent to him. He estranged Protestants at large not only by refusing to be president of the Bible Society, but by publishing his condemnation of the society in the press. He outraged Roman Catholics by rushing to England and grabbing donated funds out of the hands of the poor and homeless, the majority of the victims of the fire being Roman Catholic, and using them instead to build his cathedral. Even his hagiographic biographer used such terms as “shipwrecked” and “utterly destroyed” in referring to the effects of his actions. But any who could have read his diary upon the first day of his arrival to St John’s would have seen the tenor of his mission when he stated that rather than being greeted in a royal carriage he would have preferred

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as “a bishop of the Church” to have “a procession of litanies and holy services and priests and choristers.”70 Another colonial emissary had arrived and delivered his burden. In bold strokes he had painted the outlines of how his Tractarian vision was to be become a reality. But the people did not like what they saw – neither the vision itself nor the way it was engineered. Thus the popular opposition to Bishop Edward Feild. Even before he took the fire funds he assessed his situation and confessed to the spg secretary, “Here the Governor is my warmest friend and the people generally despise or dislike me.”71 That dislike continued at St Thomas’s. The church became the Anglican focal point of resistance in St John’s to Bishop Feild’s program of Tractarianism, and as such, was “an example of independence” for the rest of the Anglicans in the colony to follow. Its clergyman, the evangelical Charles Blackman, faced Bishop Feild and Archdeacon Bridge, and persevered, despite receiving “heavy blows and much discouragement.” The treatment by his ecclesiastical superiors was believed to have hastened his death. He was eulogized as a martyr for his opposition to “the novelties of Tractarianism” with which the hierarchy were replacing “the pure unadulterated Gospel, as Evangelical Churchmen view it.”72 Not that Blackman’s halo wasn’t bent. Tensions between Blackman and Bridge went back to the days of Bishop Spencer, who spoke of Blackman’s “uncomfortable and unprofitable jealousy,” possibly because of Bridge’s role at St John’s Church.73 Bridge later changed his theology, but Blackman did not.74 Thus Feild dismissed Blackman as principal of the Theological Institution, officially for lack of progress of a student named Saunders. Blackman did not think that was the real cause, since the student’s father told his son to withdraw six months later. He felt that Feild was dissatisfied with him because “he wished an Instructor of future Missionaries to instil into their minds his own peculiar doctrines.”75 No doubt this was what Feild wanted. The theological college was Feild’s main instrument in ensuring a Tractarian clergy. The lack of such clergy and anything less than their total compliance would put his mission in Newfoundland and Labrador at risk. Blackman was one of his ablest and most threatening theological opponents. With Blackman’s death, the controversy over his replacement at St Thomas’s further revealed that opposition to Bishop Feild at the church was not just a matter of one individual. It was the “the congregation” who resisted the bishop, and because of it “they have been subjected to numerous insults and annoyances, and denied the services of Clergymen whose doctrines they regarded with preference.”76 One such insult or annoyance

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was Feild’s response in 1852 to Blackman’s nomination of a Mr Bown to the office of churchwarden. Feild considered it an affront not only to him but to the congregation also. The congregation replied that the nomination of Bown had not offended them, and that they fully approved of Bown as churchwarden.77 Matters grew heated again when Blackman died and the congregation took steps to choose his successor. They called Johnstone Vicars as their minister, but Feild dismissed him.78 The congregation then said it would like to call John Cyrus Gathercole as their clergyman and Vicars as his assistant. The bishop refused and told them that he had already called T.M. Wood of Trinity to be their new minister.79 The congregation came together on 30 May 1853 and passed resolutions opposing Feild’s actions, asking for a clergyman of “sound Evangelical principles.”80 Feild replied that the whole congregation was not involved in the resolutions. The congregation then requested the appointment of Rev. Henry Tuckwell. Feild replied that he could not “recall an offer once deliberately made.” He said that anyway, Tuckwell had told him he was returning to England “for domestic reasons.” He was prepared to recommend to Wood not to wear the surplice in preaching, except on those Sundays when Holy Communion was ministered, but would not insist on the latter.81 William Thomas, a prominent merchant, replied to Bishop Feild against the divide-andconquer strategy. He said that the church held a meeting on 13 June and resolved “that a very great misconception appears to exist in the mind of the Bishop in assuming that any dissension or difference exists in this congregation, among whom happily the greatest unanimity prevails – the only obstacle to peace and unity arising from the conduct of the Bishop in refusing to accede to any of our reasonable requests.”82 Feild wrote to the spg without acknowledging the main issue involved, which was the calling of a clergyman with “sound Evangelical principles.” He simply discredited the opposition by saying that the congregation “as might be expected, is well instructed to be troublesome.”83 Frustrated, the congregation attempted to sidestep Feild’s authority and wrote to Governor K.B. Hamilton, asking the Crown to appoint a clergyman and asserting that because of St Thomas’s origin as a garrison church, such authority was “vested in the Crown” and not in the bishop.84 They wanted a minister of “ability, piety and Evangelical principles.” Yet Bishop Feild had passed over two ministers they recommended and instead, chose one who wore the surplice “not withstanding its known offensiveness to the Laity as a presumed indication of Tractarian sentiments.” Wood had offered to give up the surplice while at St Thomas’s, but what was the point of “the mere change of form unless Evangelical principles accompanied the change?”85 Hamilton wisely submitted the question to the law officers of

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the Crown, E.M. Archibald, the attorney general, and H.W. Hoyles, the acting solicitor general, who concluded that any “right of presentation” by the Crown was “doubtful.” After that judgment Hamilton “declined to interfere in the matter” and simply passed along the request of the congregation for the Duke of Newcastle to investigate it further. This was hardly entering the dispute “enthusiastically and with rancour” as purported. Hamilton gave copies of all relevant documents to Bishop Feild and invited him to make “any observations upon them” to include with the correspondence. Feild did write, as he said, to “abundantly explain and justify my ‘tenacity.’”86 Nothing became of it all and in the fall, Wood was officiating at St Thomas’s. A writer observed that Blackman’s decease had “afforded a glorious opportunity for the Bishop and Archdeacon to impose their Tractarian Dogmas upon St Thomas’s.” Maybe as a reaction to defeat, a group within the church had purchased “an old Dissenting Meeting House.” They were about to place in it a clergyman from England and had “the offer of six.” Nothing came of that either, possibly because the nss committee would not agree to authorize a clergyman to minister in Newfoundland without the bishop’s licence.87 In May 1854 the Record noted that three residents of St John’s had written to the Earl of Shaftesbury, a prominent evangelical member of Parliament, appealing to him to use his influence against the Colonial Church Bill, which was then before Parliament and would enable colonial bishops and clergy to pass “Rules and Regulations” even more independently of the Church in England.88 They were alarmed about this new measure because of the “ecclesiastical tyranny” exercised by Bishop Feild, an “ultra-Tractarian,” and his clergy. Local congregations had no independence and were prevented from having any influence over the calling or salary of a minister. The bishop held the clergy in a state of “abject slavery,” so that even the few who disagreed with his doctrine “implicitly carry out his commands.” There was no possibility of meaningful lay involvement at meetings because “in the out-districts … principally ignorant fishermen” would be handpicked by the clergy and thus “would be mere instruments of the Bishop.” The writers hoped that the earl would mobilize “the true friends of our Protestant Church … in Parliament,” or else Tractarian bishops would use the powers of this new bill even more to “coerce the acceptance of their dogmas, and to oppress and drive from the Church all whose Protestant convictions and Evangelical principles might lead them to reject the spurious doctrines of this Romanizing school.” They were grateful to Governor Hamilton for his intervention against “a most tyrannical aggression upon the rights of the laity” and enclosed two pamphlets showing how extreme this aggression had become.89

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2.2 In St John’s Harbour for supplies

On 5 June 1854 the Record printed another letter signed by four individuals from St John’s and seven from Liverpool, written to the Dublin Christian Examiner.90 They pointed out how Bishop Feild had total control over the Church of England in Newfoundland. Dr Ernest Hawkins, secretary of the spg, might say that the spg Committee in England appointed clergy, but in Newfoundland it was Bishop Feild who did the appointing. They could have no preachers of “Evangelical truths” because the bishop ordained “only those who conform to” to his Tractarian beliefs, such as baptismal regeneration. Moreover, he acquired “title-deeds” to many of the churches, claimed to be patron of all of them, and required them all to pay into a common fund from which he dispensed the clerical salaries. In this way the people in local churches had all power and authority taken from them. One ray of light was Governor Hamilton, “an evangelical and pious man, as well as an able and talented representative of the Queen.” The other was “the hope that prevails among the laity of a change for the better, at no distant period.”91 On 10 June 1854, the Courier printed four articles related to Tractarianism in the colonies in general and to Bishop Feild and Newfoundland in particular. First, a reprint of an item on the spg from the Dublin Christian Examiner pointed out the control that Tractarian bishops had in appointing clergy. It referenced Newfoundland specifically by including a letter from the colony in which the writer complained that “nearly all the missionaries have been ordained here” and thus the spg had little “check upon Tractarian colonial bishops.” A second article, from the Church Witness of Saint John (nb), quoted the Church Journal of New York, which

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faulted Bishop Feild in making “voluntary” contributions “compulsory.” The writer said the church “revolts at the idea of the Holy Sacraments being withheld” for payment. Instead, the bishop needed “evangelical pastors … carrying the message of life and salvation” to the people so that they “may win them to Christ, and through Christ, to a just estimate of all their Christian responsibilities.”92 In conclusion, Bishop Feild came with a mission to imprint on the city, and from it, on the colony, a copy of that recent version of the Church of England that had gestated in Oxford. Nothing was to stand in the way – neither the new St Thomas’s nor its clergyman, nor the ailing parish church at St John’s. He restructured the interior architecture of both to the dismay of many in the Protestant congregations, to showcase his new Anglican vision to them, to his clergy, and to fishermen arriving in St John’s for supplies in the spring and with fish in the fall. Dismay could not get in the way of that mission. St John’s was the rising metropolis of the island, and it was from there that Tractarianism had to emanate in all its uniformity, even if unity had to be sacrificed, whether with Anglicans, with Protestants of the Bible Society, or with anybody else. Therefore, he made the town the centre of his Church Society, turning it into an administrative arm to reach out into the outports and force money from their pockets to implement the mission. And he immediately made plans to change the college into at least some resemblance of one at Oxford. He was quite fortunate in having a commissary and archdeacon with the ability and loyalty of Thomas Bridge, since it meant that his mission was pursued in and from St John’s while he sailed out of the harbour full of resolve to imprint Tractarianism on the outports. It was also propitious that the old parish church burnt in the 1846 fire, and along with it “the fragmentary evidences of Bishop Spencer’s intentions” for a cathedral, for it meant he could begin a cherished Gothic construction unhampered by efforts of the past, and ride the great wave of sympathy in England to gain the thousands of pounds to build it.93 Nevertheless, there were many slings and arrows. Nearly the whole city cried foul over the fire funds. And the Protestant Anglicans of St John’s did not take kindly to the new colonial imposition on their freedom and spirituality at either St Thomas’s or the parish church. Through the press they joined in a transatlantic evangelicalism to protest the “novelties” of Feild, but he was the bishop, a rock that was not easily dislodged. Even the spg in London, who paid most of his bills, though they could give rules, found themselves powerless to enact them to reign in their unyielding Ulysses across the Atlantic. Though Bishop Feild was determined to extinguish evangelical Anglicanism at St Thomas’s and at St John’s Church, the people, especially at the former,

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were adamant in their resistance. His efforts and reception in both places may be summed up best by John Roberts, the clergyman at Bay de Verde, who saw the tenor of Feild’s ways quite early: “His Lordship says to his Clergy, ‘never mind what the people think nor say.’ But we find that the people consider themselves authorized to think, say and do.”94 A similar scenario played out in Conception Bay, where at Harbour Grace, for instance, the people fought his hierarchical Anglicanism to the very end of his episcopate.

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3 Conception Bay: An “Encroaching People” The wind came up from the NE and increased in the night to a gale. It continued to blow from the same quarter the next day (Saturday), and it was found impossible to make way against it. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Missions of the Northern Coast, 1846, 9

Conception Bay, at the arrival of Bishop Feild, was the hub of Newfoundland’s Protestant population, and in terms of the fishery, the largest engine of its economy dominating both the Labrador cod fishery and the seal fishery. The 1845 census shows that Conception Bay had a population of 28,000, outnumbering the St John’s district by 3,000. More importantly for Bishop Feild, Conception Bay had nearly 16,500 Protestants, over 10,000 more than St John’s and every other major bay, with the exception of Trinity Bay, which it exceeded by 9,000. In addition, Conception Bay was continually populating the whole northeast coast with many of its surplus population migrating northwards. It was the most accessible bay from St John’s, but it presented an enormous difficulty to Feild, as this chapter will show, with its focus on three centres spanning the more populated western side of the bay. Conception Bay contained the principal bastion of Methodism on the island, nearly 8,000, compared to only about 1,000 in the St John’s district.1 Furthermore, its evangelical Anglicanism was in no mood to kneel before the Tractarian crozier of the latest colonial church emissary.

harbour grace Harbour Grace competed with Carbonear and Brigus as the major centre of the bay. When Bishop Feild landed there on his visit to Conception Bay about three weeks after his arrival in Newfoundland, he was even less pleased with its Anglicanism than he was with that of St John’s. His instant verdict was that they were a “worldly and ill-instructed and encroaching

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people.” It was not that they were particularly immoral, as James Balfour had stated in the previous century while serving at Harbour Grace, his last post in Newfoundland. Balfour had painted what must have been one of the most condemning pictures by any missionary of the people he served: “The generality … are a barbarous, perfidious, cruel people.” At the time he was begging to be recalled to England and painted as dark a picture as possible to create empathy for his request for a personal rescue – bad climate, trouble, old age, declining health, scarce provisions, exorbitant prices, and immoral people. Since he wrote this indictment while in a conflicted state, one must ask how much his portrayal was a distortion of historical reality at Harbour Grace.2 But neither was Feild ready to grant them the accolades of the missionary Lewis Amadeus Anspach, who came to Harbour Grace shortly after Balfour in 1803. Anspach held them up as an example for people everywhere to emulate: “If the character of the natives of Newfoundland, in general, agrees with that of those of Conception Bay, which he (the author) had greater opportunities to appreciate during a residence of upwards of ten years among them, no where can a race be found more remarkable for indefatigable industry, for contempt of danger, for steadiness of temper and of conduct, sincerity and constancy of attachment, and a strong sense of religious duty.”3 Of course, Feild had not known them for ten years, but for one day. He judged they were “worldly,” not immoral. They were not focused sufficiently on the spiritual, which for Tractarians had a mark of asceticism and self-denial, or at least an aspiration to such. They were also “ill-instructed,” and this deficiency showed up in their architecture. To their credit they had the only stone church on the island, though it was not standing up well to frost. More disconcerting, it was internally arranged to suit the evangelical Anglican focus on preaching and was all out of sorts with the sacramental and sacerdotal focus that Feild was about to inform his clergy during the next month that was the “proper” internal arrangement of a church. It had no chancel. How could a priest properly perform that most necessary sacrament of salvation, Holy Communion, without a chancel and its altar – that holy space from which to serve the people as they approached its entrance? It had no centre aisle. Instead it had “a block of long pews in the middle with a passage on either side,” and as for the east wall at the front of the church, “in the centre of it towers the pulpit.” Moreover, it had galleries. The deplorable architecture was matched only by its congregation. In disgust Feild wondered whom he would get to straighten out these people. Certainly not someone like their last clergyman, now deceased, the “amiable” George Baring Cowan, who was “not at all calculated” to be of that character or persuasion to be up to the task. He was certain of one thing. This place had a long way to go to approach that

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“order and uniformity” that he had in mind for the Church of England in Newfoundland. He reflected a week later that they, “unless they can have a minister they like, will, I fear, be discontented and troublesome for a time till they are better taught.”4 Thus, Bishop Feild was thwarted in his desire to realign the “ill-instructed” evangelical church at Harbour Grace. To make matters worse, they were an “encroaching people.” They were distasteful to Feild since they had that independence of mind that did not bow easily to authority, episcopal or not, particularly when they considered it unreasonable. Feild perceived their robust popular Anglicanism as a threat to his authority as bishop and to any clergy whom he might appoint there. In the previous decade, when Wix had asked John Burt whether he had “delegated any ministerial duties to members of the laity,” Wix was rankled to hear that he had permitted “some member, or members” to engage in explanation of scripture and extemporaneous prayer at “social gatherings” during the week. It is likely that one of the members whom Wix suspected had gone beyond “reading” only and had added personal reflection, was John Kingwell Sr, the nss teacher at Harbour Grace. Wix told the spg secretary that every outport nss teacher was “an extempore expounder of Scripture and a conductor of prayer meetings.” They were already infected with “enthusiasm” and they needed to be obstructed, and soon, for they were “secretly, but surely, paving the way” for “fanatical teachers.”5 His picture of nss teachers as contaminated with enthusiasm is overdrawn. But they certainly represented the Protestant wing of the Church of England, and were seen as such by Anglican hierarchy, except for that questionable time, 1846–48, when Feild himself was a vice-president.6 In 1849 Harbour Grace was without a nss schoolmaster, and 120 people of the town wrote to the society’s committee for a replacement with the express concern “to prevent proselytism from the pure Protestant evangelical principles of our forefathers.”7 Neither did the Harbour Grace congregation know their proper place, for they agitated for the title deed to the church when they realized it was missing. It had found its way into Feild’s possession, possibly as early as his 1844 visit, and they wanted it back. Feild refused, though he had taken it or accepted it without the permission of the church, and sent them only a copy, saying that church land “ought to be vested in the Bishop.” Among his reasons for refusing their request for the muniment was that he had heard that the trustees wanted to keep possession of the property “to protect the Parish against any improper person sent by the Bishop as Parson or Missionary.” He said that if they refused one minister, they might refuse another, and then the office of bishop “would be made vain and of none effect.” At the 1852 annual meeting the congregation sent another request to Bishop Feild

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for the title deed, stating that it was the “express wish of the whole parish” for him to return it. Feild refused the request again. He may have been especially worried about his lack of leverage over them, because they had persistently refused to follow his 1845 directive to make a systematic collection of ten shillings per family and send it to St John’s to the Church Society for clergy salaries. Of course, they did not send the money to the Church Society from pew rents and sales, which they refused to abolish. Instead they used it to pay their half of the clergyman’s salary locally. With the other half of the salary being paid by the spg, they retained proprietary power, since none of it was administered by the bishop. This gave Feild less leverage over both the people and their clergyman, and thus their spirituality could be transgressed only with difficulty.8 How strained relations were between St Paul’s and Bishop Feild is shown by the farewell to John Chapman in 1850. The congregation of St Paul’s, Harbour Grace, used the occasion to send a clear message to Feild that they were evangelical Anglicans with a focus on the Bible, and they did not appreciate his disrespect for their Protestantism and the high-handed way he was attempting to force his foreign Tractarianism upon them: “We feel that we lose a Minister whose teaching was eminently and clearly grounded on the Bible as the only rule of faith and practice, and this too in an age when strenuous efforts are making to impose upon the People a novel kind of Religion not in accordance with the pure Protestant principles of our Church.” The farewell was signed by a large portion of the congregation.9 It is clear that, from the congregation’s point of view, it was Feild who was doing the “encroaching,” and not they. As for losing Chapman, St Paul’s may have regretted it, but certainly not Feild. He was glad to be finally rid of that “pig-headed, uncomfortable man – negligent of every rubric of the Church.”10 Meanwhile, the people were not about to give up the faith for which they had strived in forging an Anglicanism in the Harbour Grace church, aptly called “St. Paul’s,” after the New Testament expounder of justification by faith. An enduring symbol of their resolve to maintain a priority of preaching over High Church sacramentalism was their insistence on wearing the black gown in the pulpit instead of the white surplice. As a nation’s flag is a symbol to the patriotic of all that is honourable and noble, so the wearing of the gown was the preacher’s badge of courage and loyalty to Protestantism and the preaching of conversion. The more the Tractarians pressed for the surplice in the pulpit and wore it themselves, the more significant the symbolism of the black gown became. Feild in his first Charge to the clergy attempted to dissuade the use of the black gown by calling it a “selfimposed” and empty gesture. But Feild himself had already demonstrated

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at St John’s how powerful the symbol of wearing the surplice was when he chose it alone to exhibit to the people that he retained authority over St John’s Church. Thus the people of Harbour Grace gained a reputation as a flagship for Protestantism in the diocese, an example of successful opposition to Bishop Feild, which gave encouragement to others as they did the same: “It is due to the Laity of Harbor Grace, the second town in the Island, to state that they have not only always viewed the Tractarian innovations with disapproval, but have also manfully and consistently resisted their introduction into the Church of that place, and consequently to this day the Gown is worn in the Pulpit. By this conduct, they have to a great extent imbued the people of Conception Bay with a Protestant, anti-Tractarian spirit, which, it is to be hoped, will increase more and more.” Their resistance had wide-ranging implications, for what was at stake was the “spiritual and mental and social freedom of the Laity.” Stalwarts stood their ground, preaching in the black gown instead of the surplice until the 1880s.11 Feild continued up the bay to Bay Roberts, where he was singularly unimpressed by Robert Trail Spence Lowell. Feild concluded that, as “a genuine American,” he “fancies himself a decided Churchman,” but in addition to boasting, he had another “American gift” – that of lying. Feild was worried about having a dog on the church property at the beginning of Matins, to begin with, but Lowell had assured him that “Chrysostom” would not go beyond the vestry. Feild was just getting into his sermon when Lowell’s dog came wagging his tail up the steps to the altar. He immediately stopped his exhortation and ordered the dog “thrown out.” Why should he be surprised? Everything he saw at the Bay Roberts church and parsonage convinced him that Lowell conducted things in “a loose way.” As he proceeded to Brigus, having gotten clear of the American, he ran into a Scot. Feild considered that the clergyman at Brigus, John Melville Martine, was “a man of most unhappy temper, prying, prating, quarrelsome (and, appears worse than all, false).” Perhaps he began to wonder if the “loose” American was not a touch preferable to the caustic Scot. He didn’t consider either worth a broken oar. He knew he would need one greater than a Martine if he were going to make Brigus a Church-of-England town. He thought he might if he had a true clergyman – an Englishmen of deep piety.12

brigus When Bishop Inglis visited Newfoundland in 1827 he resigned himself to the fact that Brigus was “chiefly occupied by Methodists” and that the church was “altogether” in their hands.13 That this was so was due largely to John Percey, a local preacher. Details on Percey are difficult to find, but

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an Anglican clergyman of Brigus, Robert Holland Taylor, writing in 1871, stated that at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a “Parson Jemmy” whose name was “reverenced, and his memory … cherished to this very day” in Brigus. He was “in most respects” an uneducated man, but at a time when there was no clergyman or bishop, he held services, baptized, and buried, and by his example kept “alive the power of religion in the hearts of the people.” Taylor could not bring himself to say that the man was a Methodist, but he did say that as a result of his ministry the people ended up attaching themselves to “the Dissenting Service” and that at the time of writing “the Church barely owns one third of the population … and those the poorest.”14 Since there was only one such man in the collective memory of Brigus, the “Parson Jemmy” who held such “great sway” over the people of Brigus was in fact the Methodist preacher, “Parson Percey,” noted by Charles Lench in 1925 in his Brigus Methodist Jubilee. Lench drew attention to the record that on 11 January 1796 the missionary William Thoresby met the Methodist Society in Brigus, and that “it is likely” that John Percey accompanied him on the occasion, “though the history previous to 1804 is somewhat beclouded.” It is a glaring fact that Percey does not appear in any of the official Methodist records. However, this absence is explained by his not being an official missionary, but just an “agent,” and as such, along with other agents such as John Hoskins at Old Perlican and Martha Downes at Sound Island, was omitted from the minutes of the Wesleyan Conference. Lench also said that he had a book, The Methodist Memorial, owned by Percey, and claimed that not only was he a Methodist preacher, but that he was ordained in 1803 in London by Thomas Coke. In support of this unusual claim, he noted that Claudius Watts, educated in Brigus, who died at age ninety-eight “some years ago … was known to say again and again that John Percey was ordained by Dr Thomas Coke in London.” Furthermore he was familiar with a marriage certificate that Percey signed as “John Percey, Ordained preacher of the Gospel.”15 It is unlikely that Percey was ordained by Coke, at least in 1803, for he underwent an ordination, though somewhat unorthodox, in Brigus itself on 19 February 1804. The Congregationalist John Hillyard visited Bay Roberts, Port de Grave, and Brigus from Harbour Grace “shortly after” his letter of 16 January 1804 to George Burder, secretary to the London Missionary Society. Hillyard noted that Percey “had for several years” been reading the Church of England service at Brigus and that “the Society there” had affirmed him in his preaching. During his visit to Brigus “all the members of the Society” designated two of its members to request by letter that Hillyard “assist them in solemnly setting apart for the more regular work of the Ministry and the administration of the Sacraments, their Brother John Percy.”

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Since he had “no particular form … prescribed for such service,” he consulted with the members, and they all agreed to “deviate a little” from that used by the Dissenters back in England, since there were no other missionaries near Brigus to assist him. Thus by agreement Hillyard read the Church of England service and fittingly preached from Acts 13:2–3, which spoke of Barnabas and Saul being set apart for ministry by no other authority than the Holy Spirit, “the prophets and teachers” then placing their hands on them in prayer and sending them off. The “setting apart” of Percey at Brigus was then conducted “agreeable to the form of ordaining an Elder in Mr Wesley’s Prayer Book.” Then another member who “had long been in the habit of preaching occasionally” spoke from Matthew 20:26 about being a servant, and the service was concluded with the sacrament of Holy Communion, with Percey assisting. Thus with the help of a Congregationalist missionary and a Church of England service, John Percey was ordained a Methodist missionary and promised before the Methodist society gathered in Brigus that he would “give faithful diligence, always so to minister the Doctrine and Sacraments, and the Discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded.”16 It is significant that, according to the testimony of both Thoresby and Hillyard, there was a Methodist society at Brigus at the turn of the eighteenth century. It denotes that there was a duly constituted and robust vernacular Methodist gathering, for, as Naboth Winsor stated, societies were “the heart and strength of the Methodist movement.” Each society was divided into classes of a dozen members at the grass-roots level who met once a month in a drawing room, kitchen, or winter tilt, or in a fisherman’s vessel or net-loft, where they had “an opportunity to pray together, to receive the word of exhortation from the leader, to relate to one another their Christian experience, to watch over one another in love, and to help one another in working out their salvation.”17 It is this robust society, with at least two lay preachers, that we see in operation in the ordination of John Percey, and that Bishop Inglis met in 1827. Brigus was a fortress of Methodism, and the Methodist spirituality of its people was ingrained in their sealing and fishing culture. Its captains, crews, and vessels vied with those of Harbour Grace and Carbonear to be the sealing centre of Conception Bay until the 1860s, when the business was engrossed by St John’s.18 Even then its captains and crews took charge of vessels to continue to prosper Brigus to such an extent that Philip Tocque could write in 1877 that captains such as “Munden, Norman, Percey, Wheelan, Bartlett, and Roberts reside here, who are some of the richest in Newfoundland.”19 They were woven into that tapestry of glory, success, mystique and stirring adventure that was Brigus. Even fifty years later, William Greene

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could write, “Who has not heard” of Captain Azariah Munden of Brigus? It was he who in 1872 filled every cranny of his ship with the seal-pelts, and so loaded down the vessel that his men could with ease wash their hands in the sea over her massive bulwarks. Six hundred and fifty-five tons of fat turned out from his ship – the ss Commodore of but 290 tons net burthen – and he even towed 600 pelts behind him on a “long line” taking them on board when Conception Bay was safely reached. Never in the world, not even at the Seal Fishery, was another ship loaded like this one or a greater risk taken with lighter hearts – though how she swam at all was a miracle. Who again has not heard of how the same mighty Jowler jammed his steamer into the ice of White Bay with never a sign of a seal in sight? Then, when his men came back with nothing from a “cruise,” he sent all off before daybreak on the next day with orders to bring him spruce boughs from the far-off shore. But instead of boughs every man appeared with his tow of seals; and the skipper’s acumen was justified and a log-load secured.20 George Allen England derisively commented on Munden’s venture in the Commodore loaded to the scuppers, even written up in the Boston Traveller: “I suppose if she had sunk or turned over, that would have been an obvious act of God!”21 And perhaps that would have been said. But the Methodist captain, Azariah Munden, would have also certainly said that obtaining the seals and getting home with them was “an act of God.” There seems to have been something congruent with Methodism and the venture and uncertainty of sealing and the sea. It is possible that courage and confidence were enhanced by the intimate connection between a person and God that was highlighted in the immanence of Methodism. Such religion of the heart might have provided the same pluck that inspired his father, William Munden, to build the Four Brothers in 1819, “the first Newfoundland sealing vessel to exceed 100 net tons.”22 Methodism had run in the family for at least three generations. Parson Percey had married the sister of his grandfather, also named Azariah. It was he who had become the custodian of a number of personal effects of “Parson Percey” – his Bible and hymn book, and the book of biographies of Methodist preachers entitled The Methodist Memorial, published in 1801.23 Thus Brigus presented a daunting challenge to the Church of England. Nonetheless, it was one that Bishop Feild was prepared to face. With a bridgehead already established, albeit an evangelical one, from the efforts of Spencer’s clergymen, Blackman and Martin, and the Newfoundland School

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Society, he was not about to throw in the towel as Bishop Inglis had been inclined to do in 1827.24 Grand Bank had already been lost to the Methodists, and he was not prepared to let the same outcome happen to Brigus. Feild held out hope that if he could find the right kind of clergyman he would “strike some deep roots” and turn the town to Anglicanism.25 Nearly twenty years went by, but Feild thought he finally found that man in Robert H. Taylor, a graduate of the High Church St Augustine’s College, attuned to all things Tractarian. Restored from “the ancient remains” of a medieval abbey in Canterbury, it was “an ascetic, missionary college” that excelled in the devotion of “the swelling chant, the swinging censor, and the beauty of the sanctuary.”26 Taylor felt that Anglicans in Brigus had plateaued at about one-third of the population and he thought he knew why. It was the Methodists who first had reached the migrant population from Devonshire, Dorsetshire, and the southwest of England, and when the first spg missionary arrived in 1842 he was “despised … almost as an aggressor.” Taylor did not mention that the rebarbative Martine, known more for his asperity than his preaching of the gospel, got Anglicanism off on the wrong foot in Brigus. But Martine claimed that Charles Cozens, the main merchant until the 1830s, was “a bigotted Dissenter, and an increasing persecutor” of anyone showing leanings towards the Church of England. Moreover when Martine came to the town and announced his intention to hold his first service in the school, “some of the more violent” Methodists threatened to prevent it “by either turning the Congregation out, or barricading the doors and windows – and this by a people professing the greatest strictness in religion!” The Methodists did not live up to their threats, and the congregation had to deal only with “a slight interruption from a drunk man, who was said to have been sent there for that purpose!”27 It did not help that Feild pursued an aggressive Tractarian agenda in an evangelical town. In May 1845 he made an episcopal visit and “solemnly” consecrated the new church, billed at the time as “a beautiful Gothic building with … Eastern windows … filled with stained glass … also a beautiful altar-piece.”28 It would appear that many Anglicans were extremely upset by this Tractarian aggression against their spirituality. Captain Abram Bartlett, finally fed up, threw out the altar, candlesticks, and cross, then withdrew from the church and joined the Methodists.29 Bartlett preferred a Protestantism of the Word, and when he saw his church turning toward a version of Anglicanism in which he was to sit largely in silence and reverence before a priestly ritual, he rejected it as foreign to his faith. In contrast, as Ernst Troeltsch noted, Methodism offered “the impulse of personality and individuality,” even “a new sense of the sa-

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3.1 Wreck of the Wolf

credness of personality.”30 Protestants believed that the sacred occurred in the individual, and nothing was more holy than the work of God in a person’s heart. It was to personal faith that the independent sealer and fishermen testified as he experienced communion with his God in danger and adventure on ice and sea. His personality was enlarged from the freedom of that independence, from the varied experiences of his pursuits, so that each person’s life was a continual miracle of venture, enterprise, quest, escape, surprise and rescue, scarcity and abundance. His faith was fed by the Word and not the sacrament, by preaching and testimony arising from the Spirit in their midst. Thus the clergy were brought down from their seats and the people were raised, in many instances far above them, for rank was now oriented, not to titles and learning, but to testimony of experience of God. The perilous ice and uncertain sea, the measureless sphere of labour of the

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sealer and fisherman, provided plenty of experience. They provided both a test and an opportunity without limits to the individual and his faith, whether returning home in the buoyancy of plenty or in the gasp of extremity. Such experience required the voice of personal testimony and prayer. In contrast, Tractarianism sought to silence the individual before the sacred mysteries of the priest in his chancel. All were relegated to the anonymity of uniformity. Their mouths were stopped, all personal voice was rejected. Thus while Taylor stated that Anglicans could not get ahead in Brigus because they were perceived as late “intruders,” it is likely that it was the introduction of the new species of Anglicanism that prevented its growth beyond a third of the population.31 Out of twelve sealing vessels from Brigus, just one owner and captain was a “staunch Churchman.” Taylor called Captain John Bartlett “the stay and support of the Church at Brigus.” When the church construction at Salmon Cove had dragged on for a decade, it was Bartlett who hired carpenters and purchased the materials required to finish it and enabled Bishop Feild to consecrate it in 1864. But Bartlett himself faced a severe loss during the 1871 sealing voyage. It was a seminal spring for tales of narrow escape and preservation for the crew, whether they were Methodist or Church of England. He searched for seals in vain for two months and then his sailing vessel, the Deerhound, was crushed in the ice. The crew of forty-eight took to the ice, built an encampment, and drifted aimlessly on the North Atlantic for a week. The successful ss Nimrod and ss Wolf out of St John’s were sighted about fourteen miles off, and the sealers were finally able to reach the vessels. To their dismay, the 18 men who went aboard the Wolf had to face imminent danger all over again. The vessel was suddenly “crushed to matchwood” off Cape St John, and the men of the Deerhound had to jump to the ice and hope for the best once more. The men, with the crew of the Wolf, in all 150, had to pass only one night on the ice this time round, and were brought to St John’s aboard the ss Lion. From there they walked the fifty miles home to Brigus. The “almost ruined” John Bartlett went to his church to thank God for the “wonderful preservation from the perils that threatened” him and his crew. He still had a keen and painful memory of the loss of twenty of his crew three years before, which, Taylor said, “threw a gloom over the whole settlement, and produced misery and woe from which we have not yet recovered.”32 The spectre of death stared them in the face on the sinking vessels and while adrift on the heaving ice. These recurring encounters of life on the margin provided much opportunity for the crossfertilization of religious values between the Methodist crews with their exhortations and extempore prayers, and the evangelical Anglicans with their Prayer Books. The spiritual values the sealers carried with them to the

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ice were all they had to answer to their need in such extremity. Certainly there was nothing Gothic to come to their aid. Clergy did not inhabit such spaces. And if vernacular spirituality answered in that hour, then surely it was good enough while ashore, and certainly it would be enlarged at class and prayer meetings as sealers and worried wives related their experiences in kitchens and net-lofts. The women in Brigus also preferred a spirituality that lived within and enlarged “personality and individuality,” as compared to the aloof solemnity of the chancel. The former had the added advantage of being both materially inexpensive and portable. When families moved in the spring to Notre Dame Bay, and later to Labrador, for the migratory cod fishery on these coasts, all they needed to carry with them of a religious nature was their Bibles, a few Methodist books and tracts, and their love for Jesus. Whether they returned in the fall to Brigus, or migrated again to a winter house up Notre Dame Bay, that portability held them in good stead, not only to maintain their own spirituality but also to share it with others in the new locality. When Miss Wilcox of Brigus married John Holmes and moved to Seldom in 1834, she, along with Mrs Rowe, probably from Cupids, edified and exhorted each other in their religion of the heart. They were then joined by Rebecca Taylor of Cupids, the woman who, “bringing her religion with her, gathered a class during those winter months.” Taylor, who “died in the full triumph of faith,” was the leader of Methodism on Change Islands, where she lived during the summer fishery. These women, like the men of Brigus and Cupids, gave voice to their spirituality experienced in the midst of exploits, uncertainty, and adventure as they met in class meetings, whether in the house of Mr Rowe in Seldom or in that of William Taylor on Change Islands, or in prayer and class meetings in winter tilts.33 The devout Robert Holland Taylor, who arrived in Brigus in 1863, inhabited another sphere. St Augustine’s College, Canterbury, his alma mater, and a substantial contributor to Feild’s supply, was a High Church missionary college founded in 1848 by Edward Coleridge and his associates. Its focus on Gothic feeling can be gathered from Henry Bailey, the warden, who wrote of a response to the abbey ruin it was built from: “Ushered into the sacred choir by the venerable verger, their spirits were solemnised and refreshed by the holy worship, and prepared to contemplate with awe and veneration that stupendous monument of piety and skill of the saints of old. Enraptured with the wondrous spectacle, but mourning over the desolation.”34 The church in Brigus, supposedly Gothic, was certainly not sufficiently Gothic to generate this awe for Taylor. Entering it was like the shock a summer swimmer feels when jumping over the wharf into the cold Atlantic. “I was so struck with the absence of every-

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thing calculated to foster devotion.” It had no chancel worthy of the name. It had galleries. The pulpit stood “at a dizzy height directly in front of the altar.” His response to it was, “I should like to pull it down … I hope in a short time I shall be able to tell you that we have demolished the pulpit.” It was a stark contrast to the new church, that model of Gothic concinnity at Salmon Cove, which he judged was “as pretty a wooden church as you will see in Newfoundland … It is correctly laid out, with nave, chancel … a lofty gothic roof … lancet windows, and handsome pulpit and reading desk, and no galleries – and above all, a very orderly congregation.”35 Certainly no delight in individualism or personality there. All was sacrificed on the altar of awe and solemnity. The Protestants of Brigus would not have so rejoiced in the Gothic of Salmon Cove. They saw “the beauty of holiness” through a different theological lens, and as a result their immediate response to Gothic was anything but positive. They found it a repulsive retrogression: “The gloom of the dark ages … has passed away … Our churches are now the abodes of clear truth, not of oppressive mystery; places of lowly and glad worship, not of long processions and pompous display … The false poetry of a ‘dim religious light’ does not agree with our faith … the inconvenient and meaningless recesses by which the church is tortured into the shape of a cross, the gloomy windows, granting little light … the tub like pulpits” were all an affront to their Protestant sensibilities.36 Taylor saw Brigus as a “feeble branch” of the Church of England in Newfoundland, noting that it had been regarded “always … as one of the Church’s weak points.” Bishop Feild, himself, told him when he came that, as one of “the head centres” of Methodism it was “the most difficult Mission in Newfoundland.” After his toiling for six years, the census of 1869 showed that church members had increased by fewer than a dozen since 1845, while the Methodists had increased by nearly 300. Nearby Cupids was even worse. There the Methodists outnumbered the Anglicans by four to one and by 1874 it was six to one.37 Despite the disappointing gains of the Methodists, Feild pressed him to stay in 1875 when he had thoughts of leaving. Perhaps he did so because he knew Taylor had been agitating for a new church. Taylor saw a proper edifice as the answer to making the Church real to the hundreds for whom it was “almost a myth.” He believed that if he could provide a genuine Gothic structure and liturgy, the people would substitute their aural version of the faith for one that was visual. The people were not to blame, but in 1842 they had mistakenly, although “honestly,” built “what they imagined was a fair specimen of an Anglican building.” He happily announced in January 1877 that a new church had already been roofed and was due to be finished in the summer – a cruciform building with a prop-

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er chancel. Taylor testified that it was “a great comfort to me personally to worship in a church somewhat in accordance with the traditions and practices of the Anglican communion.” For all that, in his several letters on the topic, Taylor never gave the slightest indication that the people themselves wanted a more Gothic and priestly church. Actually, he stated the contrary. Just three years before the new structure was built, he grieved that not only did the church stand “in its primitive ugliness,” but even more, “the people love to have it so.” The problem was that he was serving in a “wild desert of Puritanism,” a derogatory term for evangelicalism. He could hardly state in more extreme fashion how offensive he found the Protestantism of his congregation. His only hope to create a Tractarian oasis in that desert was to build a Gothic space totally devoid of any Protestant vestige. But such an extremity he could not dare, so he had to settle for a church that “somewhat” approached his Tractarian ideal.38 Still, a large portion of his congregation rose up against it. Nearly onequarter of the membership of Brigus walked away from the new 500 capacity church to join the recently formed branch of the Anglican Church, “The Reformed Church of England.”39 It was founded in the United States in 1873 and in Britain in 1877 by evangelical Anglicans who rejected Tractarianism. Not only at Brigus, but also at nearby North River and Clarke’s Beach, they joined those who also felt “ground down to the very earth by priestcraft” but did not want to forsake the Church of England for Methodism, nor to continue worshipping in their own homes. The bell they rang out was that of evangelical Protestantism. Basing their teaching on the scripture and affirming a pan-Protestantism, they denied that the Church of England was the only order of ecclesiastical polity, and they denied the Real Presence and baptismal regeneration. They refused to call clergymen “priests” and to call the Lord’s Table an “altar.”40 When they preached, sometimes assisted by Methodist ministers, they looked intently for signs of conviction leading to repentance and recorded the number of conversions in their church services.41 In January 1877 Taylor wrote from Brigus of the “the loss of our beloved and venerated Bishop Feild.” The bishop, accompanied by his wife, Sophia,42 had replaced James C. Harvey at Port de Grave from February to May 1875. Harvey had come to Newfoundland as an evangelical missionary under Bishop Spencer and had been serving at Port de Grave since 1852, but wanted to visit England to acquire medical treatment for his failing eyesight. Ordained by Bishop Spencer in 1840, he stood to his post summer and winter for nearly half a century until age seventy-five in 1889.43 Yet, for the bishop himself to take a mission, and especially at his age, was seen as a great wonder and lauded in the Anglican press. Tucker stated, “There is

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no doubt that the good bishop gave his life for the people of Port de Grave.” Taylor called the bishop’s action “almost unparalleled.” In fact, Feild had spent only five winters, and a part of another, in Newfoundland during the previous twenty years, but instead found himself in Bermuda, and occasionally in England. Thus, “he found the work in the comparatively compact Mission of Port de Grave utterly beyond his strength” and had to enlist the help of another clergyman, Arthur C. Waghorne, another student of St Augustine’s, to carry out the required duties. Yet Waghorne said that Feild stood up well: he not only took care of Port de Grave but came over to nearby Bareneed where Waghorne was, to preach every Sunday and to visit the sick one day a week.44 However, Bishop Feild himself, the major conduit and enforcer of Tractarianism in Newfoundland, was unsuccessful in his missionary endeavour to turn Port de Grave from its evangelical orientation, which had continued during the ministry of Harvey. Possibly in reaction to Feild’s presence there, some of the people later leaned further towards Protestantism and even considered whether they should form a branch of the Reformed Church of England, as at nearby Clarke’s Beach, North River, and Brigus.45 The Reformed wind of opposition to Tractarianism also blew in Trinity Bay. When Waghorne moved there in 1878 to the New Harbour Mission, which extended from Whiteway to Chance Cove, he was upbeat, saying that it was “a field of labour of the greatest promise” and that “a most successful work is before us.” Still, he was anxious about the threat of the Methodists at Green’s Harbour and held out the hope that the Methodists of Norman’s Cove would continue to “conform to the Church.” He was quite grateful for lay readers throughout the mission, without whom “the Church’s work would be grievously hindered.”46 Nonetheless, within five years Waghorne had a major controversy on his hands and a boycott of his services, and spoke of “unscrupulous opposition” and “ingratitude on all sides,” despite the ministry he had offered. His “bitterest trouble” was that “a schism” in the form of the Reformed Church of England had taken thirty-five families from his congregations at New Harbour and Dildo. What was worse, some were “leading families” who “practically bribe” people with employment to leave the church and told “lies about me.”47 For all the blaming, it is evident that people rejected Waghorne not despite his ministry, but because of it. He himself said that the opposition arose “as one result of my efforts to give the people here the full blessings of their Church.”48 There was a strong Methodist presence before his arrival, and the likelihood is that there was a hybrid of Protestant Anglicanism and Methodism in his mission and that they attended each other’s churches. Nevertheless, Waghorne, having served with Feild at Port de

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Grave, avidly pursued Tractarian Anglicanism in his new parish. An unmistakable indication of his intent was his introduction of weekly Holy Communion, a sacramental emphasis that was an especial favourite of the Oxford Movement, and just as unmistakably indicating where the people stood – only “a handful” communicated.49 People walked out of church, rejecting Feild’s brand of Anglicanism, to form one in accord with their Protestant beliefs, the Reformed Church of England.50

bay de verde and grates cove Outside of St John’s, the earliest and most robust opposition to Bishop Feild and Tractarianism came from John Roberts, a Welsh clergyman at Bay de Verde and Grates Cove at the very limit of Conception Bay. Feild’s biographer, Frederick Jones, agreed with the bishop that he was an “ignorant and arrogant” man, “perhaps the worst mischief-maker in Newfoundland church history,” but this summary dismissal of Roberts is premature. As to his “barely literate and ignorant scrawl” on his examination paper, he was writing in English, his second language, not Welsh.51 Feild, who praised all things Oxford, would not accept his first language as a worthy medium for an examination, even if he could read it. Considering all the letters Roberts wrote to the papers of the day and their impact, it is apparent that, far from being ignorant, he had a keen theological and strategic awareness. The nss had commissioned him in 1839 on a reconnaissance “to the westward” along the south coast to assess the feasibility of establishing schools in the communities he encountered, and the society was quite pleased with his work: “He made the best use of every opportunity offered in all the places he visited to instruct the people in the things which belong to their everlasting peace by performing the Church service and expounding the Holy Scripture to them, as well as in making the above inquiries. This diligent agent received much encouragement to establish schools in most of the principal settlements he visited.” He had already established four nss schools in Placentia Bay, including one at Harbour Buffett.52 Roberts was an evangelical with an evangelical Anglican congregation in Grates Cove and Bay de Verde, and he sent the first loud blast, not just across Conception Bay, but across the Atlantic that Bishop Feild was no friend or supporter of evangelicals. His personal letter to an associate, later published in the London Record on 30 November 1846, was articulate in calling out the nss on their cohabitation with Feild, who was in England at the time claiming fire funds for his cathedral. He drew attention to two Tractarian tenets of the bishop – baptismal regeneration and the Real Presence – and

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to the diminished emphasis on preaching, which he was forcing on the clergy and teaching the young men who were preparing for ordination. Moreover, the bishop required ten shillings annually from each family in order for them to be permitted to receive clergymen’s services such as baptism, marriage, and burial. Roberts noted that some were so offended by these strange doctrines that they had left the church and were attending that of the Methodists. There were “some settlements where the people had built churches in the time of the late Bishop (Spencer … ) with the view of giving them up to the Church, but when this Bishop came they gave them to the Methodists. Whole settlements have become Methodists.” Furthermore, Feild’s Tractarianism was beginning to infiltrate the nss because when some of its teachers “saw the Bishop noticing them and ready to ordain them without the usual standing of learning, some of them have embraced the Bishop’s views, and are now teachers of Baptismal Regeneration, instead of justification by faith.”53 The timing of Roberts’s letter was made even more acute by the publication of a letter of Bishop Spencer read at the 1846 annual meeting of the nss society and published in its July Occasional Paper. Likely aware of the Tractarian aggressiveness of Bishop Feild, he trumpeted with great urgency that the nss schools and their teachers were “the great bulwarks of the Protestant faith in Newfoundland.” Joseph Haslegrave, the recent secretary of the society, and Percival White, both vice-presidents, and the whole committee responded to the Record with much expostulation and declared the Protestant purity of nss teachers. But with Feild’s continued Tractarian advance on the diocese, what was revealed could no longer be denied. When financial support began to fall off, the nss buttressed their evangelical defences, and to such a degree that Feild had to sever all connection with the society in 1848.54 Roberts demonstrated his theological acumen in a tract he published in 1847, in which he covered such cardinal tenets of evangelical Protestantism as justification by faith, regeneration, conversion, and sanctification. William Kepple White and Oliver Rouse read it while they were studying at the Theological Institution in St John’s. Actually White read it aloud to Rouse at his house. Thomas F.H. Bridge happened to come in and saw the pamphlet and went into a fit of pique. He took it up “and having read a few lines he threw it down in a pet.” Roberts said he wrote the pamphlet because “certain causes” that he would not name, no doubt all related to Feild and Bridge and Tractarianism, necessitated that he state his views on “the doctrines of Christianity.” He also said that “the Protestants of Bay de Verds and Grates Cove” had asked him to put in writing the doctrines he had been preaching and sharing with them in their homes. His defence is cred-

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ible, since Rouse himself later stated that the people at Grates Cove protested they would not have any minister but Roberts and that they liked him “very much.”55 The name of the pamphlet, The Glorious Title, referred to “children of God.” Roberts elaborated on how people gain that title through being “born again” at conversion and how it is a special relationship to God acquired by faith. He went on to say that there were only two classes in the world – those who were children of God and those who were not. In specifically using the word classes he certainly lifted up the poor in Grates Cove and Bay de Verde, who were at the bottom of society in relation to the merchants and lawyers at St John’s, and even in relation to clergymen. Having attained the status of children of God, their particular gradation on the societal ladder was no longer significant in comparison to what really mattered – their spiritual relationship to God, before whom all were equal. But it was not just economic rank that this teaching bit into. It also nullified any uniqueness that the Church of England was claiming, especially in its Tractarian dress. Roberts specifically belittled their exclusivity in his reference to “the petty distinctions of sects or parties.” And as for not worshipping under the same roof, he asked, “What matters it?” Having drawn out the principles of faith in Christ, while ostensibly writing to his parishioners, he then sent a loud salvo across the bow of Bridge and Feild: “Let me remind you that without faith in devotion … your prayers are but as the clattering of a swallow – your fastings are solemn mockeries – your sacraments are empty formalities – your whole nominal worship is one body of sin, notwithstanding all your ceremonies. Your turning to the East and your bowing in the name of Jesus are but folly and hypocrisy, if there is no faith in the heart.” Rather than being distinctly Anglican, The Glorious Title is in fact a Protestant tract appealing to a trans-denominational audience, whether Low Anglican, Methodist, Congregationalist, or Presbyterian. He did point out, though, that his doctrines were in harmony with that great Anglican mainstay, the Thirty-Nine Articles.56 Roberts was warranted in fearing what Tractarianism might do to his parish. Grates Cove and Bay de Verde at the tip of the Bay de Verde Peninsula were cordoned off to the south by Methodists. Lower Island Cove on one side and Old Perlican on the other were Methodist towns, each with over six hundred Methodists and fewer than a dozen Anglicans. Grates Cove itself was outnumbered by Methodists nearly two to one, and even its Anglicanism was a hybrid of Methodism. The residents had a dialogic relationship in which each incorporated elements of the other to an unusual degree. When Archdeacon George Coster had visited in 1828 he noted that the schoolmaster and lay reader, John Hoskins Jr, had been “always

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connected in some degree with the Methodists.” With his passing, Coster was prepared to continue with another spg schoolteacher holding Anglican services and Methodist class meetings in the same building, but he told them that if they wanted to lean more toward Methodism than they were, simply to let him know and “they would thenceforward have no claim to any service of mine.”57 When Roberts met Feild in St John’s in June 1846, he felt that the bishop treated him as “an ignorant man, a weak minded man, a bad man, a man of inferior rank.” By November he gathered that several of the clergy were so discontented, they were looking to leave the diocese, because they felt that Feild was a busybody, interfering in their ministry with an unbearable fastidiousness. Moreover, Feild ordered them to do things offensive to their congregations. For instance, he demanded that the people pay for the clergyman’s services while simultaneously offending them with his Tractarian innovations. Roberts declared that the people demanded, instead, the “power to think and speak,” and if Feild did not grant it, they would “leave the Church and build meeting houses” – an eloquent statement of lay agency. As for paying the church, the demand from the bishop and his committee could not have come at a worse time. The people worked hard and many still could get only one meal a day. Most were in a state of penury. “Owing to the fire in St John’s which burnt the provisions and to the bad fishery which have made the fishermen short in their accounts to the Merchants, the food and clothing which the poor people are able to gather are small in quantity and inferior in quality.”58 But they lost even more. The hurricane of 19 September 1846 struck many of the outports and brought them beyond extremity. Roberts wrote with deep pathos, “Almost all the property of the poor fishermen at Grates Cove was destroyed and they are now left without the necessaries of life nor means to buy them … . They have no provisions. They have no money … the merchants cannot give them credit because some of them are almost ruined … It is very trying to a man of feelings to witness their distress as I have to do when visiting from house to house, but what would it be to suffer it.”59 William Charles St John at the Harbour Grace Weekly Herald described the devastation in Conception Bay: Wherever we turn the effects of the visitation are fearfully apparent … houses were unroofed, and in many instances utterly demolished; in short there is scarcely a building of whatever description but has felt the effects of this devastating storm … But it is the sea-board that has suffered most severely: flakes, stages, boats, everything, in fact, within reach of the sea has completely disappeared … At the Grates’ Cove no

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fewer than 50 to 60 craft of all sizes were, we understand, dashed to pieces on the rocks. A schooner belonging to Mr Henry Parsons of Freshwater, laden with fish and oil was lost on the South Side of Carbonear … A large boat, owned by Deer, of Bay Roberts, laden also with produce and bound for St John’s, went to bottom in that harbour or towards the head of the Bay … The Lavinia, [under Captain] Dench, which left this for Naples on Friday last, was overtaken by the storm in the mouth of the bay, and was wrecked between Cape St Francis and St John’s.60 Nevertheless, while the poor cried out for bread, Feild determined to turn £14,000 into stone. Robert T.S. Lowell scolded from afar with “The Christ forgotten in our days”: O men well clothed, and warmed, and filled While God’s poor children fast, The very churches that ye build And deck with pomp and carve and gild Will judge you at the last. But Lowell did not just scold. Having moved back to Boston from Bay Roberts, he organized an appeal in New England “for money, or food, or clothing” for the bereft in Newfoundland.61 By March 1847, having spent less than a year under his episcopacy, Roberts had his fill with Feild and told him to pay him sixty pounds for his expenses and he would be off. He told Feild in no uncertain terms the reason for his departure: “Even a Bishop cannot treat innocent men like me according to their fancy and uncalled and unjust prejudice. I will not put up with any treatment that a Bishop nor an Archbishop think fit to give men. I will dig the earth for my food first. The chief characteristics of a Welshman are spirit of independency and resentment to tyranny and to arbitrary control.” He reminded Feild that he owed him an apology since June. Feild was unnerved by his audacity and immediately wrote to Hawkins that the man “must be very mad, or very wicked.” He realized that Roberts was the greatest threat to his Tractarian program for Newfoundland, since he had no leverage at all over him. Roberts had no regard for the normal societal restraints that were generally part of being English, and he did not obsess about financial security or promotion. Feild, realizing the volatility his Tractarianism had caused, asked Hawkins to pay Roberts off because of the “unsettled state of all ecclesiastical relations in this Diocese.” Given this fact, others both in Newfoundland and in England might “aid and abet him in

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his opposition and contumacy.”62 Feild did not mind being unpopular. He had faced opposition in St John’s before, but this Welshman had become his nemesis and could do real damage to his mission. Roberts’s spirituality was closer to that exhibited later at the Mission Church of St Nicholas in Swansea. During a New Year’s Eve service, two laymen addressed the congregation “and in homely and telling language, which went direct to the heart, spoke of the mercies of God to seamen … All was silent, but tears … ran down the cheeks of men of hard, rough natures, which the rude blasts and the wildest ‘perils of the deep’ had failed to move.” That Roberts represented the people of Grates Cove is quite clear. He gave voice to the dissent of his congregation instead of falling in line with the bishop. He refused to go against his conscience by gradually, almost surreptitiously, introducing Tractarian changes to the mission. He also refused to retire quietly from the field and seek a position elsewhere under a different bishop. While not a candidate for sainthood, he was prepared to risk his financial security as a clergyman by standing up to Feild, and he courageously brought before the public the pressing theological issues of the day as he saw them. The people of both Grates Cove and Bay de Verde were quite appreciative and did not want him to leave. Tamsay Blundon could not bear the thought of it and was in tears “all the time” upon hearing of the prospect.63 The Rouses, who replaced him, were a good fit for Grates Cove and Bay de Verde theologically, since they and their parishioners were evangelical Anglicans. When Oliver encountered the hurricane while crossing the Atlantic with Feild in the Hawk on 19 September 1846, he wrote in his journal an evangelical response to the spectre of death: “I know in whom I have believed and am persuaded the blood of Jesus is sufficient to wash away all my sin.” He and Maria had come to Newfoundland to teach with the nss, and Feild ordained him deacon, along with John Roberts, in July 1846. He had a more sober assessment of Feild than Roberts, saying that he “was certainly a High Churchman but with-all, an hard working man, and one who had the welfare of his people at heart.”64 Whether that included the people of Grates Cove was open to question. Before he left St John’s for his mission, Bridge informed him that Feild had ordered him to “have nothing to do with the ‘Grates.’ I was not to marry, bury, baptize, or visit any of the people residing there till they had legally by ‘deed of sale’ made over the ground, on which the church stands, to the bishop.” Feild already had required from Rouse the oath of canonical obedience, but he realized he would not be able to leverage his power on the tip of the peninsula though his deacon while the people retained control of their church property. Rouse promptly obeyed Feild and told the people of Grates Cove practically verbatim that

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he “would have nothing to do with them at all, till they made over the Church to the Bishop.” Not even bury.65 Feild did not leave much freedom to Rouse as a deacon, but instead ruled in the minutiae of his ministry. For instance, he ordered that marriages be celebrated in the morning, not in the evening, i.e., afternoon. It is clear that what Feild expected from his clergy was not canonical obedience, but obedience to his will, encroaching on Rouse’s ministry to such a degree that he left little to his personal discretion. Thus Rouse’s journal is an illustration of the ways of Feild in relating to his clergy. How much did Rouse himself distinguish between canons and the demands of Feild? At least in the case of one marriage, he performed the ceremony in the afternoon at the insistence of the groom, but then wrote to Feild asking him what he should do if he met that circumstance again. He interpreted canonical obedience as simply obedience, possibly even to the point of being obsequious. He obeyed Feild’s demand of payment for ministry in money or in kind, exacting the fee from the destitute with little mercy. The late failure of the fishery in the late 1840s, compounded by the St John’s fire and hurricane of 1846, reduced the people to skin and bones. Rouse was told on 28 April 1848 that a person in nearby Old Perlican had actually died of starvation. When he met Maria Tarrant on the way to church, she had so pined away from hunger that he was “affected almost to tears with her appearance.” He realized that her husband and children were in the same state at home. In the face of such heart-rending need, he applied for Indian meal from the government and he and his wife, Maria, privately determined to pursue self-denial that they might help some of the poor. Still he made Stephen Lewis, who had no money, promise to bring him “a hundred (sticks) of wood in the winter” as a fee for receiving his baptized child into the church. He recited the demand of Bishop Feild that to receive any clergyman services the annual charge was “5s – a head.” Feild put the screws to Rouse and withheld money from him until the church collection was made and in his hand. Having come home from church on Sunday, 16 December 1849, Rouse, recently ordained priest, entered into his journal, “This morning I published the names of five individuals as refusing to subscribe to the Church Society, viz., James Rodgers, Thomas Critch, David Pryor, Stephen Prendergast, and James King, and gave notice that neither they, nor their families would hence forth receive any benefit from the Ministrations of their Minister – that I would not baptize their children, church their women, etc.” The people must have felt that Feild and his committee were a Star Chamber in St John’s and that their minister, before their very eyes, had become a mere official truckling

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to it. Was not a minister supposed to be a Good Samaritan helping them bear their burdens? How could their clergyman stand between them and their last crust of bread. Bewildered, James Churchill thought it “a very hard thing.”66 According to Rouse’s diary, the instructions of Bishop Feild that Rouse attempted most to enforce had to do with money and property, and not with his Oxford brand of Anglicanism. The Anglican dispute over the church property at Grates Cove was not settled when Feild visited the mission on horseback in November 1849, so he bypassed the community and refused to visit the people there. When he administered the sacrament at Bay de Verde, to Rouse’s grief there was not a single communicant.67 Since Rouse rarely saw Feild or Bridge on the land’s end of the Bay de Verde Peninsula, his major struggle was not contending against Tractarianism, but instead wrestling his people out of the arms of Methodists. This was particularly the case in Grates Cove, especially during the ecstasy of revivals. During the winters of 1858 and 1859, for instance, some of his congregation were taken up with the “enthusiasm and frenzy” and barely escaped being “swallowed up in the vortex of excitement.” Nonetheless, they finally opted for the “more real heart-felt, unobtrusive piety” of the Church of England. The Methodists were never able to break through the Anglican phalanx at Bay de Verde and, remarkably, the Anglicans remained constant at Grates Cove from 1836 to 1884. The Methodists showed significant increases in the 1845 and 1857 censuses, but the later revivals, while possibly doing something for their spirituality, did nothing for their numbers. To Rouse’s surprise, the pronounced effect on his church members experiencing the ebullience of the revivals was a deeper Anglican spirituality. He observed, “While I exceedingly deplore these extremes in religious enthusiasm, I must acknowledge … that in numerous instances a greater concern about the soul’s salvation and the number of our communicants has greatly increased.”68 Thus Rouse ended up with an increasingly spiritual evangelical Anglican congregation, one of whom was able to take matters in hand when he met his end, dying from typhus. Since “it was not thought right to take the body into the church … a fisherman, one of his own flock,” read his funeral service in the churchyard before “nearly all his parishioners … and many Romanist neighbours, by all of whom he was much respected.”69 In conclusion, Feild was not able to make any great Tractarian impression in Conception Bay. He experienced emotional turbulence when he crossed the bay just three weeks after his arrival in Newfoundland and viewed the interior architecture of St Paul’s Church, Harbour Grace. Yet he remained powerless to storm the Protestant fortress. The people would simply not stand for it. The black gown in the pulpit became their badge of ho-

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nour in their long resistance to his “novel kind of Religion.” Carbonear next door was “the stronghold of the Wesleyans,” who were also ensconced in Brigus, where both preachers and sealers had dyed the culture with Methodism.70 Finally in 1863 he was able to send a missionary there, Robert H. Taylor, who was willing to fight its Protestant Anglicanism, only to cause a schism in the church. Neither was Feild able to advance his cause at Bay de Verde, the other extremity of the bay. The people there and at Grates Cove opposed him first by supporting his nemesis, John Roberts, and then by maintaining their Protestantism with Oliver Rouse. Each time Feild beat across Conception Bay from Cape St Francis to Baccalieu on his travels north he was reminded that his Tractarian mission was coming up short in Newfoundland’s most populous bay. As he headed toward Cape Bonavista, to his regret he continued to be buffeted by contrary winds.

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4 Northeast Coast: A People “Possessed with a Feeling of Their Own Importance” In proceeding to the Leading Tickles, and just after passing Ward’s Harbour, the Church-ship, then under charge of a local pilot, at half-past seven o’clock, a.m., ran upon a rock known in the neighbourhood by the name of Foolscap, or Cheeseman’s Rock. The speed at which the vessel was going caused the shock to be very violent, and all attempts to draw her off proved ineffectual. The tide also was just beginning to fall. By the timely help of Mr Henry Knight of St John’s, who, with several men from Ward’s Harbour, came to render assistance, a large portion of the ballast was removed, and the vessel otherwise lightened; and, after remaining in this uncomfortable and dangerous predicament nine hours, at halfpast four o’clock, with the full tide, she again floated; and was piloted by Mr Knight into Crutwell [Cutwell] Arm, a beautiful harbour on the lee. As might be expected, she leaked greatly, and it was necessary, even in the harbour, to pump every half hour. [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 3 September 1857

bonavista, salvage, and bonavista north When Bishop Feild first visited Bonavista in July 1846 he could not be totally sure about the safety of the Hawk, since he was depending on a roadstead for protection instead of a harbour. As it turned out, no wind came up, and all he had to contend with was “returning from shore at night through the swell” to board his anchored vessel and then being “somewhat tossed” until morning.1 He must have been less sure about how secure the Church of England was in Bonavista. It had already suffered serious losses from two Methodist gales in the decades previous to his arrival. The first revival of 1824, which swept over not only Bonavista but also Bird Island Cove [Elliston] and Catalina, began with George Crewe, a class leader, “the chief instrument that God used in this place.” For four months, wave over wave first of repentance and then of ecstasy washed over the people in a great

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outburst of vernacular Methodism. The local Methodist missionary wrote that “such wailings, mournings, groanings, and bitter cries I never witnessed before and to the eye it presented a scene of extreme torment.” It was also characterized by “loud breathing which … reminded one of the rushing wind on the day of Pentecost.” Following a time of repentance, people became “filled with raptures of joy” so much so that James Hickson, looking down from the gallery, could hardly believe what he saw. Normally “averse to noise and every thing like disorder,” he was so taken with one man as he “became more ecstatic” while shaking his hand that he “caught a measure of his spirit.” His reserve fell away and he himself became at least a partial participant in the revival. The “great joy” extended to Bird Island Cove and Catalina, where sealers “from different parts of the country” who had come into port because of adverse winds, heard the news and carried it with them to the icefields.2 It was the missionary William Ellis who witnessed the second Bonavista– Bird Island Cove revival in 1834. Again there was the phenomenon of “mourners groaning for pardon” and then “faces beaming with joy.” For instance, at a service on 13 April two young women were converted. Ellis wrote that one “got up and shouted aloud his goodness. And I can say, as the late great Wesley said on similar occasion, such a sermon I never heard before. She talked so sweetly of Jesus and his matchless love as melted every heart in the house. Soon after, the other young woman mightily rejoiced in God her Saviour, and preached him to all present.”3 Bishop Feild did not speak of vernacular Methodism in his journal entry of his visit to Bonavista. He carried out his episcopal duty of confirmation in the three communities without much comment, and there was nothing in them to consecrate. He did mention that the church at Bird Island Cove was not finished, because the people were poor. That was sidestepping the other half of the story, namely, that even since the post-revival 1836 census, the Methodists had increased their numbers by 50 per cent and the Anglicans were reduced by half. Possibly still shaken by the fire at St John’s during the previous month and numbed by the way Methodist fires had burned over the tip of the Bonavista Peninsula, he headed for the Anglican fortress of King’s Cove and Keels, where, although there was some danger from Roman Catholicism, it had proved impregnable to Methodism. He noted for the first time that he was greeted with a “particularly hearty” welcome of gun blasts in each place, and even with “an old cannon … lying by for many years” that was revived and brought into service for the occasion. He went about holding confirmations and the Lord’s Supper and departed to “the same demonstrations of respect.” From there he visited the Anglican town of Salvage, where a single Methodist was hard to find. The

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Methodists had made attempts on Salvage, even recently, but to no avail. The people were quite friendly to them and had welcomed their missionary, George Ellidge, in 1842, and actually had given him access to the school when the Church of England hierarchy would not let him preach in the church. But he came and he went. The people did not take to Methodism. Similarly, the Methodists had little success at Trinity, which Feild visited next. They had established a foothold of a little over a hundred people in a population of over a thousand, but they could make no gains whatever, even with a resident missionary.4 Feild also did not register his unease that, in addition to its bleeding to Methodism, the Church of England that remained was a divided house. Nearly everywhere he visited he had to conceal his aversion to evangelical Anglicans, who at such places as Salvage, Bonavista, Trinity, and King’s Cove, coalesced around the Newfoundland School Society. At Salvage they were the only kind of Anglicans. Archdeacon George Coster had waxed on in the 1820s about the people of Salvage, “almost to a man, Episcopalian Protestants,” calling them “very superior to what one commonly sees in one of those out of the way places, destitute of clerical care.” Archdeacon Wix feared that they might succumb to a “fanatical” nss teacher who, like the others, would be “an extempore expounder of Scripture and a conductor of prayer meetings,” in addition to handing out evangelical tracts and booklets.5 And they did. A woman in England donated the requisite funds, and Salvage received its first nss teacher in 1842. Joseph Baggs did not preach as a lay reader in the way that Wix feared, but instead “read a printed sermon twice every Lord’s day.” He also distributed tracts, for instance, from the Religious Tract Society, and the nss noted that up to that time the society had distributed “nearly half a million … breathing the doctrinal and unctional spirit of the Reformation.”6 The focus of the evangelical Anglicanism of Salvage was the scripture. Charles Rock West, the first clergyman, was able to report twenty years later that “the Bible is daily read in many houses” and “there is not a house in Salvage without either Bible or Testament.” In fact, by 1872 there was too much popular religion as far as the next clergyman, H.M. Skinner, was concerned. There was “a tendency amongst the Fishermen to gather together in one another’s houses on Sunday evenings to hold some kind of worship,” and he was worried that it might result in people forming views opposite to his. Since Salvage was surrounded by Methodists, “who are in fact Ranters,” he decided to give lectures against Methodism on Sunday evenings to show them “the more excellent way” of the Church of England and at the same time to supplant the vernacular meetings, lest some “schism” might eventually take place. No doubt he was bolstered by his bishop’s recent Charge to the Cler-

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gy in which his bishop declared that Methodist revivals were “unreal,” and merely “efforts to recruit or sustain an unreal Church.”7 Thus as Feild’s tenure was winding down, his Tractarianism had little impact on evangelical Anglicanism at Salvage, but unlike many of the surrounding outports, they did not turn to Methodism. Neither did they fight the bishop; they simply ignored his peculiar brand of Anglicanism. Robert Dyer, the evangelical teacher of the nss at Greenspond (1839–59), dealt with Feild and his agenda more like Oliver Rouse than John Roberts in Conception Bay. Being out of the immediate range of Feild, he ministered his evangelical Protestantism to a sympathetic people largely under the radar. Still, two factors caused him to tilt slightly towards the bishop – Feild’s priest at Greenspond and Dyer’s growing desire to be priested himself. The latter gave Feild a degree of leverage over him, for Dyer, in Roberts’s words, “saw the Bishop noticing” him and ordained him deacon in 1849. This gave a hope to Dyer that he would receive the second episcopal blessing of priesthood. But it was not to be. Throughout the eighteenth century, Greenspond became well established as the head of what W. Gordon Handcock called a “settlement hierarchy” in Bonavista North. English merchants and traders made capital investments there in the form of wharves, warehouses, stores, and stages to supply the surrounding islands, and, by far, the settlements were on islands. Greenspond maintained its status as a mercantile centre for the region throughout the nineteenth century, though as time passed, largely as a satellite of St John’s firms. The trappings of colonial government reached it from St John’s also.8 It was in the first half of the nineteenth century that the Church of England sent a clergyman to Greenspond, but only under the threat of the Methodists setting up there before them. With “a large outlay of money” in the prosperous Napoleonic War era ending in 1815, the people, demonstrating remarkable spiritual zeal and initiative, had built a church for “Divine Worship according to the Liturgy of the Church of England” and petitioned the governor to request a lay reader’s salary from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (spck) for Thomas Walley, who served in that capacity, as well as schoolmaster, for ten years. For all that, it was not until Archdeacon George Coster became alarmed with the visit of the Methodist missionary, John Corlett, in 1826, that a clergyman was finally sent in 1829.9 Although no drawing of this church is extant, the missionary, Julian Moreton, said that it had no chancel and had “two high square pulpits,” probably one for the clergyman and one for the lay reader. It approximated what Bishop Feild called “the Newfoundland style” characterized by a “preference for pews, and galleries, and pulpits in the centre.” To Tractarians

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it was “most unsightly and ill-contrived,” even “wretched,” but this was in fact the architectural vocabulary of the typical Church of England building of the day with a Protestant focus on preaching, hence its high pulpit in the centre at the front of the church and a communion table for the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in the rare event of a visit of a fully ordained clergyman, rare indeed at Greenspond before the appointment of Nathaniel Coster, the archdeacon’s brother, in 1829.10 There were likely other Protestants than Anglicans in the congregation, and probably not all of the Anglicans were of the same views. When Bishop Inglis visited in 1827 he did not find silent submission. Instead he was struck by the prevalence of “contentions, which check every good undertaking” at Greenspond.11 Neither was Bishop Feild pleased when he visited twenty years later, but he did not single out a diversity of views as the cause of his displeasure, but rather a deficiency of gravity. He was particularly offended at the confirmation: “I observed too many coming forward with a smile on their faces, or looking with sly glances at each other as they knelt at the rails, and awaiting my approach, certainly, with any feeling but that of awe.” He feared that their incorrect attitude “extends to their other religious duties and services.”12 When Julian Moreton spearheaded the building of a new church in 1854, he highly complimented the people as builders, saying that they all built their own houses, and many even their vessels. He himself “constructed a model” of the church, and it “was approved after a very particular examination and criticism.” What exactly were the people criticizing in Morton’s model of a church? He condescendingly stated that though they were “competent to judge sensibly of the convenience and strength of a building,” they did not have the ability to properly judge “of its fitness, in other respects, for its sacred purpose.”13 However, it is obvious that the people themselves thought they could judge everything they wanted in a church and were baulking at the design in front of them. What Moreton wanted to build, no doubt, was a structure to house the Tractarian ritual and piety of Theophilus Anglicanus. Moreton came straight to Greenspond from the Theological Institution with an avidity for all things Gothic. He had studied there under Feild’s architect William Grey, the principal, who gave lectures in architecture twice a week. It was Grey’s firm conviction that in Newfoundland “the Clergy must be architects,” for it was they who would end up being responsible to build churches in their missions, and these churches must have a quality of feeling that enabled “ritual solemnity” during the service. This meant they had to be Gothic, with chancels “in every possible case,” lancet windows with pointed heads instead of arches, sharply pitched roofs, and open ceilings, so that they may attain to that “great principle of Christian architec-

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ture, its verticality.” In contrast, the fashion of open ceilings, for instance, which struck the clerics of Gothic as “strikingly grand,” merely appeared to the people as something “unfinished.”14 Moreover, it made for a terrible waste of heat in winter. Another principle of architecture, the “strength of a building,” no doubt was a contested point between the people of Greenspond and Moreton. Galleries were a way of contributing to that strength, since they were supported by upright posts from floor to roof, and these posts were in turn reinforced by crosspieces that went from one end of the building to the other. Thus, given the winds in Newfoundland, galleries were “almost universal.” Perhaps they were popular also because they provided the warmest place in church in winter. Even so, everybody knew that Feild “wages war against them,” even in the older churches, so he would certainly not favour putting them in one that was new.15 One wonders why he was so inimical to galleries. It probably reminded him of Methodist and Nonconformist meeting houses, where the focus of the gathering was on hearing the sermon preached instead of on the sacrament. Galleries and tall pulpits added a sense of heightened drama during the preaching that a church with centre and side aisles did not replicate. Loud amens would descend from the upper reaches. It also could have had to do with verticality. One did not want to have people up in the ceiling, for it crowded out that hierarchical space that helped induce transcendence and solemnity. Regardless, the people of Greenspond were accustomed to galleries, and they insisted they be installed in the church that they would build. There also must have been much debate over the pulpit. Moreton noted that in the new church there was “a handsome pulpit,” but he neglected to state that it was still high. Though it was now a “handsome” hexagonal pulpit instead of a “square” box, the people prevented it from being “tumbled down,” as Le Gallais was able to do at Port aux Basques. They did allow Moreton to include a chancel, steep roof, and open ceiling, but he did not get his centre aisle.16 Coffman noted that the church is “a curious hybrid” and stated as a possible reason that the people “still drifted uncertainly between the poles of Methodism and Anglicanism.”17 St Stephen’s is indeed an amalgam, but if there was oscillation at all in the Greenspond of the mid-1850s, it was between two expressions of Anglicanism – Tractarian and evangelical Protestant. The newly minted Moreton was pulling in the direction of the former and the people of Greenspond in the latter. Methodists had indeed migrated to other islands in Bonavista North and were continuing to migrate, pursuing cod and seals, from the western side of Conception Bay, that fertile crescent of Methodism, and from Bonavista. For instance, by 1842 at least three Methodist families had moved to Flat Is-

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lands from Carbonear. Moreton worried that in his “vast mission” of Bonavista North, although not reflected in the 1857 census, there were “emigrants, and the children of emigrants, from other places in Newfoundland where dissent is rife, and where they attended the Meeting house, and they still hanker after it.”18 Then there was possibly an even greater concern, crosspollination from transhumant Methodism. Newfoundland fishermen and often their families were a people on the move, as were the cod and seals that they pursued for their livelihood. Moreton gave a cry of alarm when he visited Pool’s Island in May 1859 that “some Methodists from Conception Bay” had been there and “practised many indecent extravagances at several revival meetings,” which they held “in my people’s houses.” As an antidote to these gatherings, beyond all “sense of reverence and propriety,” he urged the people to take advantage of what the Church of England had to offer, “especially the Holy Communion.” Since he had been there as recently as February, and the Methodists he referred to had already departed by May, it is quite likely that they formed part of the sealing crews of vessels that wintered at Pool’s Island, as they did at Greenspond, to leave for the ice at the beginning of March. And it was not just sealing Methodists in the spring that Moreton had to worry about. At Cape Freels, for example, “many families who come from Spaniard’s Bay and other places in Conception Bay to fish” had summer homes at Cape Freels. While Methodists in Spaniards Bay were as rare as Bishop Feild in winter, likely there were some at Cape Freels from the “other places” in the bay.19 It was in the 1860s, and later, that Methodism proliferated in the islands of Bonavista North. At that time, for instance, Methodist spirituality replaced that of the Church of England on Cobblers Island. A similar dramatic change took place at Cape Freels and Middle Bill Cove, still later. Greenspond Island experienced the impact of Methodism, but not at the centre. Moreton felt in 1859 that “a new settlement rapidly forming at the back of Greenspond Island” would be prone to Methodism and that it might result in a Methodist chapel. He wanted to build a Church of England lecture hall there to fend it off. Of course, these Methodist newcomers were not a threat to the evangelical Anglicans of Greenspond itself. They were impervious to Methodism, much like those of Swain’s Island and Pinchard’s Island, who were practically untouched by the 1860s revival. “Old Mr T.” of Swain’s Island told Dyer that he was talking with Moreton “about the isms of these times,” probably referring to Tractarianism and Methodism. He would never follow Tractarianism, since he would never turn his back on “the Gospel truths, the Religion of our Evangelical Church.” Moreton told him he might change his mind if “a very learned minister” came along. The man was illiterate, but sharp. He told Moreton he was not going

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to find a more learned man than the one who wrote Galatians 1:6–8, not even to listen to an angel coming with a different gospel. But that did not mean he was, or would become, Methodist. Rather, no one could persuade him to “leave the church of his forefathers.”20 That same determined independence had flowered on Pinchard’s Island. Feild in his episcopal habiliment was stopped in his tracks when his clergyman, Julian Moreton, placed a painted stained glass window in the east end of their new church. The Newfoundland Express reported that they simply “would not permit his Lordship … to officiate in the Church, unless the window was covered.” Brought up short, Feild could only proceed with the service and the laying on of hands of confirmation when he agreed that the window would be removed after the service. They actually wanted to take it out before the service, but Feild, “being afraid of a party triumph,” told them that if they were going to do that he would hold the service in the school. They were particularly offended with the Tractarian embellishment, which had in the centre of the window “the Cross and Our Saviour hanging on it … a real crucifix.” Feild said that neither he nor Moreton chose the subject, it was selected by “some friends in England.” He, wittingly, possibly in an attempt to regain his dignity, preached about the Samaritan believers not receiving the Holy Spirit until the apostles Peter and John laid their hands on them, Acts 8:14–17.21 Yet the people may have been straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel since the new church, designed by William Grey, was in Feild’s view “one of the most correct and satisfactory (at least internally) of all the churches in Newfoundland,” unlike the hybrid built later at Greenspond.22 This meant, of course, that it was without galleries and had a centre aisle, segregated chancel, and raised altar – the appropriate theatre for performing Tractarian ritual. As for Swain’s Island, there was little that Tractarianism or Methodism could offer the Anglicans there – Thomas Brenton, for instance. When Dyer visited one September, Brenton was waiting to tell him about “a blessing from the Lord” he had back in February. He said he received Holy Communion on Saturday, and “on Sunday night I had a great light come to me, so beautiful, and I thought I saw the Blessed Saviour at the foot of the bed. It seem to me that I saw His face and His breast was all like Gold. I seemed so that I embraced the Saviour in my arms. I was so happy. I thought myself almost in heaven.” He guaranteed Dyer that he was wide awake and that it was not a fancy or a dream. “No one shall ever convince me but what it was true and that I really saw what I say.”23 It would be difficult for Feild or Moreton to convince the Anglicans of Swain’s Island that they had to give up their spiritual freedom, and that, instead, to fellowship with Jesus they had to build a Gothic structure with an

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ornate chancel that they were forbidden to enter. It was sealed off by a rail at which they had to wait for the priest to deliver them the grace of God, of which they already professed a spiritual intimacy. This would seem to them a reversal, a reintroduction of the Holy of Holies of the Old Testament, a sewing up of the curtain after it had been “rent in twain.” It would seem that the New Testament had never been written. Perhaps this is why a man named Jacob, also of Swain’s Island, told Dyer on one of his visits that he preferred him to Moreton: “Why, Mr Dyer, what you tell me seems to do me so much more good than that Mr M. tells me.” Dyer had been articulating a gospel of joy to whoever would be converted or saved. Before 1849 when he became a deacon, permitted to preach, he read to the people of Swain’s Island and elsewhere sermons by John Harding, an evangelical rector of London who relegated priests and sacraments to the penumbra of spirituality. Speaking of the spiritual life of the saved, Harding preached, “It is the Spirit of God who creates that inward man. It is the love of God which actuates that inward man. It is the joy of salvation, a salvation all full and free, pardon, justification, acceptance, everlasting life, all given, given now in Christ, this joy it is that fills the heart.” This person was in contrast with one who just went to church and depended on its sacraments: “They were in infancy baptized, and now in riper years they are constant among the worshippers in God’s house, and, it may be, regular communicants at the table of the Lord. In these and other things they exhibit the outward and visible signs of union to Christ. But there they rest. This is their ground of hope … The error is in principle the same. People put the externals of church communion in the place of vital godliness.”24 It would also be difficult for even the Methodists to have something on offer to the Anglicans of Swain’s Island with such “vital godliness,” who felt they were already in the presence of Jesus in a supernatural embrace.25 This difference in their Anglicanism partially explains Moreton’s comments in his “unvarnished account” of the people of Bonavista North. He was offended that they preferred the spiritual advice of Aunt Rachel, a “very knowledgeable woman,” to his. Moreover, “the class of ‘knowledgeable persons’ to which Aunt Rachel belonged is a numerous and troublesome one.” As a matter of fact, they were in nearly all the communities that were “out-settlements” of Greenspond.26 Because of their “self-conceit,” he found them as “dead flies” in the ointment of the particular Anglican spirituality that he espoused. And they did not defer to Moreton just because he was a clergyman: “They proclaim on every side their superior knowledge and perception, and are too often valued at their estimation by their more humble-minded neighbours. Such persons make it their especial province to interpret scripture; and if their view differ from an exposition given by their clergyman, this dif-

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ference does but show their skill and capacity to teach.”27 He was tormented that people did not submit to the religious opinions he dispensed to them as their priest. They disregarded his view of himself and instead considered themselves capable of testing what he had to say by measuring it according to scripture. He did not acknowledge, at least in writing, that a large part of the rejection was due to the division he brought to Anglicanism. Protestant Anglicans had no truck with the Tractarian mould that Moreton was trying to squeeze them into, and they appealed to scripture as the final arbiter against him. They were buttressed in their stand against Moreton by a new attitude in general toward “persons of higher birth, wealth, and education.” A radical change in their “temper and bearing” towards such “higher” people had occurred in their new environment in Newfoundland. Moreton reckoned that this was because they saw the clergyman, the collector of customs, the doctor, and merchant agent as their dependents, far more in a parasitical relationship to them than in one that was symbiotic. Hence, instead of acknowledging Moreton and his class as superior, the fishermen were instead “possessed with a feeling of their own importance.” Their “studied independent bearing” was particularly evidenced by the immunity they had acquired to being ordered around by their superiors. Moreton was quite struck by this development: “Having complete command of their time, these people are of a strange imperturbable habit. Unaccustomed to move at other men’s bidding, they are hardly excited to action unless impelled by their own perception of need. ‘When I see my own time,’ is a phrase continually in their mouths. Their very look betrays this feeling … their gait and every action seems possessed with a dignity, which would be ludicrous if were not the token of so hurtful a temper.” Part of that dignity of the fishermen was due to their strong work ethic. In contrast, the trait the few rich in Greenspond had in common was that they “do nothing for their bread.” They could read and write but their literacy had merely made them idle. To Moreton this was so unlike the docile disposition he regarded them as having before they or their ancestors emigrated from Dorset and Hampshire. Moreton said that he dwelled on these “most prominent faults” of the people because its existence was “a chief obstacle to the missionary’s work amongst them.” Nothing was “more painful” to his memory of missionary work in Greenspond and area than his “longcontinued effort it cost me to surmount this.”28 The particular sting of that pain was that as a result he was not able to leave with a sense of having placed a Tractarian stamp on the Church of England in Bonavista North. They refused to be contained by its priesthood and asserted that democratic sense of freedom to express the spirituality they had gained from

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4.1 Fishing fleet bound for Labrador

scripture. Just before the beginning of a service in a schoolroom, “a very fine old man, from Christchurch in Hampshire … rose from his seat,” came to the reading desk in front of “the assembling congregation … and repeated to me the whole of the Ninetieth Psalm in verse.’”29 In that psalm he gave voice to a vernacular spirituality that the Lord was his “dwelling place” in the schoolroom, at home, and out in his fishing boat, and that a priest’s sacramental Christianity enclosed in his chancel were a superfluous appendage. In contrast to a life of subjugation under squire and parson in Hampshire, in Newfoundland in the New World all was free. It was not only that there were “no taxes nor tithes and a person can enclose as much garden ground as he can manage,” as Richard Newman at Twillingate told his brother back in England, it was also that he could freely harvest what he liked and where he liked of birds, animals, fish, and forests.30 This augmented his sense of spiritual freedom and contributed to his refusal to have his voice silenced by the hieratic religion that Moreton brought to Greenspond from his home country, as welcome as a northeast wind. Robert Dyer, in contrast, communicated the Protestant gospel to the people of Bonavista North, and not just by sermons, but by home visitation, teaching children, and by distributing tracts and loaning books. His diary has a high number of entries of visiting the sick, urging them to repent of their sins and to turn to Christ and ask for forgiveness, instead of depend-

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ing on their own merits before God. One woman who was “not far from the time of her dissolution” he begged to ask Jesus for “pardon through his blood alone.” Generally he was well received in this mission. One man told him, “Could I crawl to the Saviour, I would do so if I crawled off all the skin on my knees.” Dyer reassured him that the Saviour was waiting to save him. Another person said she had hoped for thirteen years for her sister to come in to see her “at last, before she died,” for her sister passed Greenspond twice annually on her way to and from the Labrador. “She prayed that if it please God the winds would when she was passing be contrary so as to compel them to put into Greenspond … the wind did come up contrary so that she did come into Greenspond.” Dyer told her that since God gave her this earthly blessing and comfort, how much more was he ready to grant “pardon of her sins, if she sincerely ask Him.” Mrs Johnson had done just that, and though she was physically far spent, “she seemed very happy, trusting, she said, only on Christ.” William Windsor of Swain’s Island “held my hand a long time, saying, I shall never see you any more Sir.” He begged him “to flee to Jesus his only Saviour.”31 Dyer also sedulously reinforced evangelical Anglicanism as the official schoolmaster at Greenspond of the largest or second-largest nss school in Newfoundland.32 He extended his influence outside the school through the distribution of tracts and books on sealing vessels in the spring and during the winter transhumance “into the Bay.” Annually at the end of February or the beginning of March, Dyer distributed as many as 700–800 tracts to up to twenty-five vessels going to the ice from Greenspond and sometimes from Pool’s Island. He was a welcome guest. As he said, “Not one leaves without them.” Sealers told him that they were “delighted” to read the tracts. One sealer was exceptionally keen. Andrew Dunn visited Dyer in August to obtain a tract that he had heard read while out sealing, and he wanted to read it to others. He found it so interesting that “he could repeat a great portion of it.” The young sealers who were graduates from the nss school generally took the lead spiritually on the vessels. In addition to tracts, they requested books before departure, so that on Sundays they could read “the Church prayers and a Sermon to the crew on board.” One sealing captain practically turned his vessel into a floating chapel. He requested “tracts, a bible, some Evangelical work of theology, and a volume of sermons.” He had always had service on Sundays but in 1855 he intended to add “family prayers daily, night and morning.”33 People also requested tracts and books when going to their “winter quarters” from late October to May. Next to fish, wood was the most important commodity in the daily life of a Newfoundlander and it was usually acquired in the winter. Families moved off the headlands and islands to be

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nearer to the shelter and ready fuel supply of the forest. But this was only a part of the reason for this annual migration. Under the truck system, cash was in short supply, so almost everything that families used was made of wood, which was abundant and free “in the bay.” Fishermen cut from the forest all the wood needed to build their houses, stores, and stages, and chopped and sawed it into sills, studs, boards, and shingles, not to speak of furniture, flakes, and fences. They did the same with timbers and planks and built their boats on site in winter. Then there were implements mostly of wood for fishing such as oars, gaffs, slob haulers, tholepins, and spudgels, breadboxes, buoys, and killicks. From wood they made a hundred other necessary items such as sleds, handbars, wheelbarrows, buckets, clothesline posts, and poles. Then there were working tools made of wood such as planes, mallets, bucksaw frames, and handles for sundry items such as chisels, hammers, malls, and prongs. But winter had many hours too dark for work outside. It was the time especially for telling stories, reflecting, and often reading. It was often only the children in the family who were literate, and they would read the tracts and books to their parents “during the winter in the woods.” The focus of this material was to encourage people to “embrace and ever hold fast to the blessed hope of everlasting life” through Jesus Christ, as Elizabeth Wallbridge of the Isle of Wight did in the Dairyman’s Daughter. The Prayer Book also figured large in this Anglican spirituality. One man was sick before setting out. He came to Dyer for a copy, telling him that he thought “he may never return” and that “he wished to have some prayers to prepare him for his hour of death.” Dyer gave him a pamphlet of prayers from the Prayer Book and “a few excellent Tracts.”34 It was a popular evangelical Anglicanism based on the word, and not on priest and sacrament that was the impetus for this vernacular spirituality. These were sealers out on the rising and falling sea and heaving ice, not priests in their chancels, who provided for their mutual communion with God through tracts, sermons, Bible, and Book of Common Prayer. The younger sealers had memorized collects and lessons from the Prayer Book while in school, and many had copies in their homes. Dyer ordered 150 from the spck in 1846. One boy while in school said, “I would rather have a Prayer Book than a shirt.” And Dyer recorded his visit with an older man who related a singular event of “some years” ago. He had been on a sealing vessel that was lost, along with their bundles of clothes, but they themselves were saved. One man had wrapped a Book of Common Prayer in the middle of his clothes. The bundle was “beating about in the sea for a month” before it “was picked up 30 miles from the place where the vessel was wrecked.” And maybe in a variation of the Gideon miracles of the fleece, when the

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Prayer Book was taken out of the saturated clothes it “was perfectly dry.” He said that it was the only copy they had for forty to fifty men.35 Dyer did not modify his evangelical Anglicanism during Feild’s tenure as bishop. They seemed to get along fine, with Feild complimenting Dyer for his “excellent school” and Dyer speaking of his “very kind Bishop.” He even considered that Feild preached “in each place good Evangelical sermons” during his 1853 visit to the Greenspond mission. It is not known how much they were dancing around each other in their written expressions of mutual admiration. But we do know that Feild had a continuing quarrel with the nss, since neither could stomach the other’s theology, and moreover, the nss considered its premises a sanctuary from his episcopal authority. Nevertheless, Feild had leverage in the relationship, because Dyer wanted something that only Feild could give him – ordination to the priesthood. Much of the process to become a deacon in 1849 had been harmless – for instance, Dyer had to study a lot of Latin – but he also stated that Feild read to him “certain rules and regulations, with a serious charge” and that he promised the bishop canonical obedience. Yet Dyer was still thinking evangelically that it would contribute to his ministry in “the salvation of precious souls.”36 He could now write his own sermons or preach extemporaneously. He did not appear to take to Feild’s Tractarianism, but continued to focus on evangelical conversion in his ministry. Dyer visited Governor K.B. Hamilton in June 1853 just before the governor’s all-out confrontation with the Church Society and seemed delighted that the governor was “a decided Christian” and “diametrically opposed to the isms of the present day but zealous to spread the Evangelical Doctrines of our church.”37 Dyer opposed Feild in gathering signatures for a petition against Feild’s personal campaign for subdivision of the Protestant Education Grant. By this subdivision the Church of England would receive a grant for schools “under the direction of the Clergy and other members of the Church only.” This would place the Church of England nss education grant and theology in peril.38 Soon after becoming a deacon he gave up hope in Bishop Feild ordaining him priest. He wrote to the nss committee in 1852 “expressing a desire to be removed to some other colony in which the Bishop is friendly and where he may have more full exercise of his ministry.”39 Dyer was correct in his estimate of the situation. A fellow nss teacher, John Marshall at Belleoram, whom Feild made a deacon in 1845 and who continued to minister for nearly twenty-five years, he never did ordain priest. Yet Bishop Hibbert Binney of Nova Scotia ordained Dyer within a year of his arrival in Prince Edward Island in 1859.40 Dyer also had other than theological issues with Feild’s new man in the Greenspond mission, Julian Moreton. He seemed to be in a tug-of-war with

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Moreton, who, Dyer thought, was not doing his share as priest. A couple of times when Moreton went to St John’s to be made priest and to be married, the first for a month, and the latter for a six weeks, Dyer stated, “I am left alone” to do the work of “both church and school.” At another time when Moreton left for Flat Islands before the September arrival of the Circuit Court to Greenspond, he noted that “Moreton has escaped as usual.”41 There was obvious distance in their relationship. When Dyer and Johnstone Vicars, the nss superintendent, were on a tour through the district and met Moreton at Swain’s Island, Dyer commented, “For what purpose he was there we know not.” In his June 1856 quarterly report to the spg, Moreton was irritated that Dyer’s 1854–55 nss report did not give him the credit he felt he was due. To him the nss report implied that Dyer was doing all the work at Greenspond, since he was said to have “preached twice every Lord’s Day, attended the Sunday school, and visited the sick.” Moreton complained to Dyer about it, but Dyer told him that he did not actually write what was printed. Moreton was quite indignant with the nss, saying that “other Reports of the same Society, makes it impossible to avoid regarding such misrepresentations as intentional and systematic.”42 His anger with the society caused or reflected a strain in his relationship with Dyer. Dyer made one accommodation to Feild: he wore the surplice while preaching, at least occasionally. This was not a small matter. In the great controversy with Tractarians, preaching in the surplice became their signature emblem, much as a stethoscope over the shoulders of a doctor. It was an issue still very much alive in England, for to many Protestant Anglicans it was as a red flag to a bull. “In 1845 the curate of a parish in the English diocese of Exeter, after wearing his surplice in the pulpit, was mobbed by a crowd of two thousand and required police protection.” Still, on the high occasion of having the Circuit Court entourage on their summer visit to Greenspond in 1850, the evangelical Dyer wore the surplice. It must have been a relief to him that only one person boycotted the service. He mentioned wearing it again in 1859 at St Mary’s Church on the South Side in St John’s. There were about nineteen clergy present, no doubt all in their proper attire.43 While the stresses and strains of evangelical Anglicanism wore down Moreton in Greenspond and disturbed his sleep, possibly more than the loud noise in the walls “like the booming of heavy guns” in the middle of his first frosty night on the island, it was Methodism that caused havoc to Anglicanism in Twillingate and nearly everywhere else in Notre Dame Bay.44 Bishop Feild could not afford to shoot at the evangelical Anglicans who lived in the bay, for Methodists were assailing his church on every side.45 With his Tractarianism an unpopular option on the northeast coast,

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he had to make the best of it against the common foe. He was particularly hampered in his Tractarian program in the large centre of Twillingate in having two successive evangelical Anglican clergyman, John Chapman and Thomas Boone, who ministered to a like congregation for decades before his arrival and to nearly the end of his episcopacy, 1824 to 1873.

twillingate The people of Twillingate, though largely evangelical, exhibited a greater diversity in their faith in the late eighteenth century and in the early years of the nineteenth century than later. In fact, their first successful application for an evangelical missionary was to neither the Anglicans nor the Methodists but to the Congregationalists, when William Wheeler, John Colbourne, James Stuckles, John Moors, William Manuel, Christopher Eyers, Samuel Jeans, and others, “principal inhabitants of Twillingate,” wrote to the London Missionary Society (lms) for “a minister … to instruct us in the way of faith and holiness, and … in the salvation of Christ.” They noted that their parents, who had received “pious impressions” in England, had taught them, “but our fathers are dead, and we left alone.” They had also received “books and letters from Mr Jones of St John’s.”46 The lms sent John Hillyard in 1799, who remained for a term of three years and visited again in the summer of 1804. But then came disappointment. He did not return to Twillingate at the second request for a missionary in 1802 by John and Lydia Moors and their “brethren and sisters in the bonds of the gospel” to William Kingsbury, Congregational minister at Southampton. There was a significant lay involvement in worship at Twillingate at the time, for Hillyard noted that he made it a point during services to give opportunity to “two or three men, who have a gift in prayer, by no means despicable.” He also said that there were many books in the harbour, but he asked that Samuel Greathead, a Dissenting minister in England, send him some tracts and books from the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge. Specifically he wanted James Janeway’s Token for Children, Matthew Henry’s Pleasure of Being Religious, John Shower’s Serious Reflections on Time and Eternity, John Reynolds’s Compassionate Address to the Christian World, Joseph Alleine’s Alarm to the Unconverted, and Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted. The sprk, founded in 1750, the first evangelical tract society in England, published such items as these for the poor, “to bring them acquainted with the truth as it is in Jesus, and render them wise to Salvation.”47 Isabel Rivers, who has studied the sprk, noted that it was founded because the spck, founded in 1698, was hostile to Dissenters and “ignored what they regarded as the essential doctrines of the gospel.” The society,

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which consisted of Congregationalists, Baptists, evangelical Anglicans, and others, largely Calvinist, published established classics for distribution to the poor. According to their 1795 report, the items requested by Hillyard shortly after his arrival in Twillingate were among the most commonly sought after from the society, apart from copies of scripture and of hymns by Isaac Watts.48 Though new arrivals were indentured to such merchants of Poole as the Slades and Colbournes, whom John Chapman regarded as “doubtless firmly attached to the Church of England,” it is likely that in addition to Congregationalists there were, as at Trinity, a few Quakers and Presbyterians among them.49 There may have been some like William Harding, who visited both “a Calvinist meeting” of the Congregationalists and then the Quaker meeting house at Bristol at least a couple of times while pondering Methodism, before he departed on 23 April 1819 for Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Similarly, Robert Eastman said that he “saw the ‘capers of a good many religions’” before he emigrated to Harbour Breton from Yeovil.50 Chapman said that some in Twillingate regarded all the ordinances of the church as useless and believed that “the Spirit works in men without the use of human means, and in a way altogether miraculous.” They even opened a meeting house, but to no avail. This sounds very much like Quakerism. Others, “especially in Moreton’s Harbour,” but not only there, were “very hostile to baptism.” They may have been Baptists who believed in believer’s baptism instead of infant baptism.51 When Bishop Inglis visited in 1827 he noted that there was “much jarring” in Twillingate over religious views, as at Greenspond, and then jarred a bit himself, adding his own opinion that some of them were “very wild.”52 No doubt some questioned the very idea of a bishop, while others may have ruminated on his appearance among them in a warship. Richard Newman, agent at Twillingate for Thomas Colbourne, was possibly one of the people doing a little “jarring.” He was a parishioner of John Chapman, had his children baptized by him, and bought a half-pew in St Peter’s Church. He referred to Inglis as “the Bishop of Halifax” and received confirmation from him on 1 July by the laying on of hands.53 This did not mean that he was limited to all things Anglican, for he was a member of a wider Protestant ecumenism. He owned a copy of Evans’s Sketch of the Denominations, which grouped the sects according to their views of the person of Christ, predestination, and forms of church government, then added a catch-all that included Quakers, Moravians, Methodists, and millenarians. The purpose of the book was to promote charity among the various sects of Christianity, among which he included the Church of England, by giving “a more just knowledge of each other’s tenets.” Evans, a Baptist minis-

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ter in London, edged up against this aim when he spoke of the Methodists he witnessed at Nottingham, who, “under the influence of a religious phrenzy, occasion by their groanings and vociferations, an uncommon degree of tumult and confusion.” But the “more sensible Methodists” were not into “such fanaticism.”54 Newman sent a copy of the book to his sister Martha in England and wondered “which sect” she considered “most agreeable to the scripture.”55 He also asked his brother to have copies of the Evangelical Rambler bound and sent to him. Each volume, edited by the Congregationalist Timothy East, minister at Ebenezer Chapel, Birmingham, was a series of tracts that provided an apologetic in narrative and essay form for the conversion to Jesus Christ that was common to all evangelical Protestants. It defended evangelicals against such terms of opprobrium as Methodist and fanatic and called for Anglican ministers to preach conversion in the Church of England instead of having parishioners believe that adherence to the rites of the church would alone effect salvation.56 The variety of belief at Twillingate was similar to that of Poole, which was a pluralist Protestant town in the 1850s with 1,043 Congregationalist worshippers on Sunday morning, 31 March 1851, equal to nearly half of the Anglican attendance, and double that of the Methodists. There were also 200 Baptists and 12 Quakers out to their meeting houses.57 By then the multifarious Protestantism of Twillingate had experienced a reduction in diversity by coalescing around two options, Anglican and Methodist. Yet this tendency to a dichromatic Protestantism can be overstated, even in midcentury. Chapman observed that when he arrived in Twillingate in 1824, Dissent was so prominent among the people that he could not press on his congregation to give financially to the church lest they desert it, and that fifteen years later there were “still some fierce and violent Dissenters” in the community. While the fervour against the Church of England had “very much abated,” it is quite telling that Chapman thought as late as 1840 that the clergyman had to continue to offer his services free “for some years to come” in order “to secure them lastingly to the Church.” That said, when Chapman thought of Dissent in the 1840s, he was thinking largely of the Methodists, for he named them as such. As at St John’s at a much earlier date, the swelling Methodist body had separated from the plateaued Congregationalists and struck out on their own.58 There is little doubt, nonetheless, that what Chapman had on offer in Twillingate, though becoming deeply divided with the Methodists, was another Protestant option in the form of evangelical Anglicanism. In replying to John Slade, Andrew Pearce, John Peyton Jr, and others in his farewell address, he brought up the sore point of the Methodist exit from his church. His argument was basically that the Church of England was the true Protes-

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tant church, and not the Methodists, because it rested on “the Word of God” and not on “the wild feelings of fanaticism.” He also made the patriotic “church of our forefathers” appeal, but he did not plead church tradition as an authority. Similarly, when he left St Paul’s at Harbour Grace a short tenure later, the members highlighted his preaching “grounded on the Bible” alone “in accordance with the pure Protestant principles of our Church,” although on that occasion the enemy of classical Protestantism was not Methodism, but Tractarian Anglicanism.59 Architecturally, St Peter’s Church at Twillingate was a model of a Protestant church. Like St James Church at Poole, from which its brass candle fixtures came, it had a high pulpit in the centre at the front, concretizing its focus on preaching. Moreover it had galleries, which gave a more intimate congregational effect around hearing the Word, in addition to that practical matter of strengthening the church structure.60 Amidst a great array of bunting and mercantile cannon blasts, Feild consecrated the church shortly after his arrival in Newfoundland, but he must have had to force the words of consecration from his lips.61 He had to bear it because he had very little leverage in Twillingate, even as a bishop. Methodism was making such strides in the harbour that he could not afford to divide the Anglicans by pressing for Tractarian changes. The clergyman’s salary was paid totally by the spg, which meant he received no contribution from the Church Society that Feild controlled. Moreover, the people continued with pew rents, which solidified a sense of local ownership and authority. And he arrived as a latecomer just as the finishing touches were being put on “the Newfoundland style,” that is, Protestant structure. About all he could do was wring his hands and consecrate it, grimacing as he stared up at the lofty pulpit. The people of Twillingate had spoken – not with words, but with the Protestant edifice before him, which they had built with their own hands. Over twenty years later, stormbound in the harbour, on his way back to St John’s from Tilt Cove, he continued to lament that the church, “unfortunately” built before his arrival and “the first I ever consecrated,” still had no chancel, had a pulpit in front of the altar, and had galleries.62 He may have been reflecting on his episcopal inability to effect change there. Not out mingling with the people, but taking advantage of the delay he wrote to Julian Moreton, lately of Greenspond but since appointed as a military chaplain in the Crown colony of Labuan in the South China Sea, that three clergymen could “give as much trouble” to a bishop as thirty-three, “perhaps more.”63 Thomas Boone, who replaced John Chapman, his host at Twillingate, does not seem to have given Feild much trouble. He was no John Roberts.

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But he had been no chanticleer for Feild either. He had not pushed Feild’s Tractarian program as a local clergyman, as Moreton had done at Greenspond. For all these years he had supported, or at least tolerated, pew rents, which Feild had forbidden in his 1845 Circular to the clergy. He had acquiesced for many years in the congregation not making the required collections for the Church Society.64 He certainly did not have a Real Presence focus on communion, but rather received it “in remembrance of his death and passion.”65 No doubt in Feild’s mind he had “left undone those things which he ought to have done.” Perhaps Boone could detect a hint of censure in his eyes. After two weeks holed up not just in the place, but in his house, for Feild was not travelling in the Hawk, finally he was gone. One wonders how they got on. Boone believed in episcopacy and saw it as part of the arsenal in fighting Methodism. When Feild held an ordination in Twillingate in 1861, he spoke of it as “a solemn act … by God’s chief Minister” and hoped that, despite the poor weather keeping many away, people would “look into and reflect upon the authority upon which this mode of appointing men to the sacred office of the priesthood is founded. The Church does nothing without authority.” But Boone had to admit that, even in his own church on that occasion, “there were present some who hold in light esteem ordination by bishops and who look upon everything with contempt that pertains to the episcopal office.” Methodist revivals were taking their toll, and what was particularly troubling as he looked out over his congregation “in these days of change and fickleness” was that “many belonging to the Church have no very great attachment to it.” He kept losing members as large numbers of Anglicans were simply taken by “those monstrous and exciting revivals,” so maybe the Tractarian Feild, a man who exuded confidence in his office, was a comfort to him as everything else seemed to be giving way. The never-ending exodus of Anglicans was not stopped by the long visit of Bishop Feild in 1868. The next year a distraught Boone had to report to the spg once more “that several of the Communicants, besides others, were drawn away from the Church. I talked and reasoned with them but all in vain.”66 Because Boone had Methodism to worry about right in Twillingate, he could not be tormenting himself over the Tractarianism of his bishop, for he could not fight a war on two fronts. Back in 1846 he had named the Methodist “schism” as a “special discouragement” in his annual spg questionnaire. It had become “deeply seated.” And it did not get any better, for in that year also, the Methodist missionary John S. Peach arrived in Twillingate, and his time there was “four of the happiest years of his life. A gracious revival of religion crowned his labors.”67 When Bishop Feild himself visited in 1849, he felt its effects. The weather was “beautifully fine and

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4.2 Making fish

warm,” yet the morning congregation “seemed thin.” Was it possible that not only Methodists, but also evangelical Anglicans were staying away? Moreover, the number getting confirmed was small for a place the size of Twillingate. Feild wrote in his journal, “It is sad to see what mischief dissent has wrought in this place – the old people are become cold and conceited; the young rude and careless.”68 Feild was taken aback that the Methodists in Twillingate did not defer to him in his episcopal capacity. But they knew who he was and what he was about through articles on Puseyism in the Methodist Magazine. And the furor he had caused among evangelical Anglicans in St John’s and his denial of their legitimacy and his harsh rejection of the Bible Society had travelled north ahead of him. They felt confident in their vernacular Methodism, freely expressing their spirituality as they exhorted and prayed

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extemporaneously in their meetings, and they would give no quarter to one who would, if he could, have them silenced. Thus Boone was in continual distress as the rising combers kept washing up against the foundation of his church. By 1853 the Methodists had grown to sixteen class meetings with no sign of letting up. Just one leader of one class meeting was a challenge, such as Peter Samways. He was about twenty years old when he came to Twillingate from Dorset as a cooper for John Slade & Co. and was converted to Methodism shortly after in the mid-1840s. Then for over sixty years he “occupied all the positions open to consecrated Laymen.” He had a room in his own house exclusively for ministering to people in class meetings. He had a notable reputation as a lay reader. “He … spent as much time in preparing to read a sermon as some men to preach one, and it was wonderful reading, and to be led by him in prayer was something never to be forgotten.” He was recognized for his talent as “leader of vocal and instrumental music,” and he also served as Sunday school superintendent and secretary of the Trustee Board. Seven of the class leaders were women who no longer just made supper, beds, and fish, but also made strong Methodists, pastoring the individuals under their charge through teaching, counsel, and prayer. Because of such lay initiative, Methodism was even still gathering in strength at the time of Feild’s visit in the summer of 1868. True, fire had destroyed both church and parsonage that spring, but their pastor had already been to several cities in the provinces of the new Canada raising funds to rebuild anew.69 The problem for the Church of England was the fire of Methodism. The Hart’s Cove misstep a decade before had taught both Boone and Feild how potent the Methodists could be. On his 1857 voyage in the Hawk, Bishop Feild had two episcopal functions in view when he reached Twillingate: a confirmation and the consecration of the cemetery at Hart’s Cove in Twillingate harbour. The latter was not to be. His first disappointment occurred even before he reached Twillingate. Sailing between Ward’s Harbour (Beaumont) and Leading Tickles, a local pilot ran the Hawk right upon a rock known as the Foolscap while going at high speed. Moreover it was just after high tide so that the vessel was pinned there for nine hours. When finally freed, the Hawk leaked so badly that the pumps had to be manned every half hour on the way to Fogo for repairs. Feild had to find his way to Twillingate in another boat, where he was discomfited a second time.70 His local clergyman, Thomas Boone, had his eye for some time on the Hart’s Cove cemetery on the south side of the harbour, the main domain of the Methodists, and in preparation for the bishop’s consecration had it enclosed with a fence. His plan was to claim the cemetery and then build a church near it to establish a foothold for the Church of England in that part of the

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harbour where the Methodists were especially thriving. Bishop Feild was delighted with the plan. Possibly on Saturday, 5 September 1857, since it was a fine day and he arrived at noon, Feild gave public notice and made arrangements to make a sacred procession around the harbour, or across it, and consecrate the cemetery. He opened his “tin box” in which he carried his episcopal robes, stole and mitre, and, maybe with the assistance of his chaplain William Grey on that occasion, he began taking them out and putting them on one by one. With his mitre firmly in place and having grasped his crozier, just as he “was about to proceed to the consecration,” he was peremptorily addressed by none other than a Methodist who placed “a paper” in his hand. Each looked the other in the eye and then Feild read the note protesting his right to consecrate the Hart’s Cove cemetery as the “exclusive” property of the Church of England. Off came mitre, stole, and all, for there was to be no consecration that day. For a long time to come, every Anglican in Twillingate and for many miles around had to bear the embarrassment of their bishop, even Anglicans in other bays, for the news spread to Durrell and Bluff Head Cove and into many other coves and harbours. Bishop Feild had to disrobe and retire from the field in shame because his Church of England sense of entitlement caused his reach to exceed his grasp. Going full speed ahead and brought up standing on the Foolscap, he had run aground a second time on the rocks of Hart’s Cove. The bishop left, but Boone didn’t stop his campaign to take the cemetery. Possibly feeling some distress that perhaps he had not done his homework for his Lordship, he acquired two lawyers who agreed with him that the church had “a most undoubted right” to the property. And there the matter lay for a couple of years. Feild returned in July 1859, mainly for repairs to the main boom of the Hawk. Although there were six clergymen along with the bishop holding services on Sunday on both sides of the harbour, there was no decision to make another attempt to enclose the Hart’s Cove cemetery for the Church of England.71 Then, in the last week in January 1860, with Feild long gone and situated in Bermuda for the winter, a Methodist died. Thomas Harris, the Methodist missionary, determined to bury him next to his father in the Hart’s Cove Cemetery, despite having received a letter from Boone’s barrister forbidding him to do so. Boone had locked the cemetery gate. Harris applied for the key. It was refused. The Methodists said that when they arrived with the casket, Boone and several Anglicans were guarding the gate, so they took to the fence. They ordered the constable to break it down, entered the cemetery, and buried the man. The Church of England had struck out a second time in Twillingate, and no doubt the animosity index rose another notch. What made it a particularly bitter pill for Boone was that his

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“own churchwarden … and other principal persons … These very men who signed the paper for the consecration” in the first place, had been converted, left the church, and joined the Methodists in the two intervening years. How much could a man stand? Still not ready to give up, Boone decided to take matters to court and give the Methodists a lesson for their “unwarrantable aggression.” Months passed. To his total disgust, when the Circuit Court came round in the late summer of the following year, “the unjust pretensions of the Wesleyans” prevailed and the case was withdrawn, and the cemetery at Hart’s Cove was given rest and remained “common” to all.72 Boone’s church continued to bleed Methodists badly. In a way, the church was not unlike like the cemetery. Boone stood guard at the door as an evangelical Anglican and held the key to the Protestant pulpit, but it was as if the sides were broken in as his people rushed to Methodism in droves during revivals. As a result, one reads the familiar refrain in his reports to the spg that “several families have left the church.” In his account of 1860 when the “excitement was at its pitch” he wrote an impassioned account of what he had to contend with: I cannot but mourn still more for those who have been drawn into the belief that the exciting and outrageous scenes which have been exhibited this winter in the shape of revivals have God for their author. What has taken place almost baffles description and I would rather cast a veil over them than expose them to the light. The wild cries, the maniac actions, the dancing and jumping as the process of conversion goes on are dreadful to think of, and it is far more dreadful to think that any man professing to be a Minister can lead the ignorant and simple to propose or believe that it is all the work of God. Every night there was a prayer meeting and sometimes two or three in different parts of the islands. It was no unusual thing for them to remain till two or three o’clock in the morning, praying, raving and converting. The prayers of their deluded souls were devoid of all reverence, decency, and sense. Some in the Harbour and very many in the Bays have been drawn away from the Church in consequence of these outrageous and absurd proceedings. The poor people believe that these things are absolutely necessary to salvation and hence they seek by every means to excite … their feelings by which they obtain a proof which they think unmistakable that they are now safe and sure for heaven. They feel their sins have actually passed away and because they feel this they are happy. Hence their jumping and dancing. It is impossible to argue with them and a waste of time to attempt to point out a better way.

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Before the occurrences of this winter, many men were then half disposed to return to the bosom of the Church. But all is now changed, for their convictions are now strengthened by what they hear of the amazing conversions in Ireland and elsewhere.73 Boone could not do much about it but stick to his post. He certainly was a conscientious evangelical Anglican, like John Chapman before him. For instance, in speaking of a sealer who had nearly died at the ice, instead of referring to church rites he had or had not received, he commented instead, “He read his bible and expressed his humble hope in Christ, resting all his expectation of future happiness in the merits of his Saviour.” Similarly, to a woman dying, “I spoke to her of Jesus, of the only refuge to be found for sinners. Her own state and her need of a Saviour were explained to her.”74 And he was not just a talker. Few have written with such empathy over the plight of his parishioners. He affectingly wrote of the passing of Mrs Newman, convinced that she could stand up to any Methodist: And now I come to a sad period in the history of my labours, sad to me. An aged Christian of 68, Mrs Newman, who went out as a midwife and who was respected by all sensible people for her good deeds and consistent life … In losing her I lost a most valuable assistant. She was truly a deaconess of the Church. In visiting the sick I always found her a useful help, and frequently requested her attendance in administering the Holy Communion. Her rectitude and piety were unquestioned. Hers was a long life of usefulness. She was always ready to minister to the wants of the poor. In their throes many have been cheered by her encouraging manner and by their confidence in her skill. We may say of her, as soon as the ear heard her, it blessed her, as soon as the eye saw her, it gave witness to her. Her works of mercy will long survive in the memory of many … It may not be out of place to quote a portion of my sermon, the concluding part of it, as best conveying the way I feel … “Truly we have lost a Mother in Israel. Who, in certain kinds of sickness will not feel the want of her? And who in any sickness will not miss her? Who more capable of giving comfort, when comfort was needed, of restoring cheerfulness when cheerfulness was required to render the proper means more effective? Who needed kindness and it was not granted? Who asked for help and it was refused? Who knows not her unwearied labours, her fatiguing journeys? In the depth of winter, in the height of the snow storms; sometimes with help, sometimes without help. You might have seen her contending with the snows and drifts. Whilst prosecuting the work of love, was the poor ever spurned

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at her door, or the ungrateful rejected or denied when her help was necessary? … But her works of godliness were not inferior to those works of charity, some of which were necessary, and others were voluntary. Sound in the faith, of solid piety, of calm but fervent devotion, she valued too much the services of God in his church ever to be absent when prayers were to be offered, and she valued too much the duty of serving God in his house, to neglect it there. A constant reader of God’s word, she was grounded in the faith, and her piety was cheered and fed with the oil of heavenly grace … “A worthy deaconess of the Church of Christ, ever at the call of her Minister to attend the sick bed, when the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s supper was to be administered, and the presence of someone was necessary to instruct and to [hear] the devotion of the worshipper … she continued firm in the faith of the Holy Catholic Church, seduced by no new fangled notions of the day, and able at all times to give a reason for her faith and practice. The desire of her soul was so to live as to be found watching whenever the Lord should come.”75 Boone made an interesting observation about Methodist converts from Anglicanism. He was convinced “that those who have been taught in the Church are the most efficient members and the best informed among the Wesleyans. Those who have been brought up in Wesleyanism seem to be inferior to them who have gone over to Wesleyanism.”76 Why was this so? Of course, it is not uncommon for the new convert to a religion to take commitment more seriously than those who had become accustomed to it since childhood. He could not have been thinking that they had a better grounding because of the Church of England tradition of weekly readings of scripture and prayer in collect, epistle, and gospel in the Book of Common Prayer, since the Methodists received the same through their Sunday Service book, which approximated it quite closely. Possibly, he believed that the sermons of the Church of England service grounded its members in the teachings of Christianity much better than the extempore preaching of the Methodists. Yet many Methodist lay readers simply read sermons and added comments. Or did he think the converts brought a deeper reverence from Anglicanism to Methodism? He may have been referring to the more devout Anglicans he lost to the Methodists. He mentioned on one occasion that “several Communicants, besides others, were drawn away.”77 At the same time he noted that many in the church appeared to be “indifferent” about the specific denominational church they attended.78 Could this apathy have been due to there being many “Dissenters” such as Congregationalists and Baptists in Twillingate from the beginning who dis-

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seminated a Protestant understanding of the church – namely, that the gospel is what matters, and church organization is quite secondary.79 This Protestant ecumenism, which Henry Winton at the Public Ledger still proclaimed in St John’s in 1847, was articulated by the London Missionary Society as early as 1824: “As the union of Christians of various denominations, in carrying on this great work … it is declared to be a fundamental principle of the Missionary Society, that its design is not to send Presbyterianism, Independency, Episcopacy, or any other form of Church order and government … but the glorious gospel of the blessed God to the heathen; and it shall be left … to the minds of the persons whom God may call into the fellowship of his Son from among them, to assume for themselves such form of Church government as to them shall appear more agreeable to the word of God.”80 There is little doubt that Boone had keen Protestants sitting in the pews, many of whom were open to an infusion of Methodist spirituality without necessarily leaving St Peter’s. There was a cross-fertilization of spirituality occurring. Thomas Harris, in speaking of the “mighty work” of the revival of 1860 in Twillingate, which Boone judged to be “exciting and outrageous,” observed that the Church of England was not being emptied because of it, but was “better attended.” He further explained that as a result of the revival, members of St Peter’s were “beginning to examine their Bibles to ascertain whether they may scripturally expect to realize the converting grace of God before they approach the grave; as they have been taught to wait till then before they can hope to know their sins forgiven.” Some of these members may have attended not just the Methodist chapel but also house meetings, for “on one night five prayer meetings were being held at the same hour in different parts of the settlement.”81 Still, it seems that the Protestant Anglicanism that Boone was preaching was for many a stepping stone to Methodism. It was one thing to believe propositionally that one’s sins were forgiven because scripture said so. It was quite another to rely on one’s “feelings by which they obtain a proof which they think unmistakable.” Once people believed in the Methodist experience of the Holy Spirit, it was unlikely they were going to remain in the Anglican Church. Why would they be content with an intimation when they could experience the real thing? All they had to do was to let go of the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession of bishops, which they may have held lightly, and whatever was unique to the Church of England went with it. Tractarianism, on the other hand, for those who did not reject it, provided a more formidable wall to Methodism, since it pitted the feeling of solemnity against that of ecstasy. As Gregg Finley said of nineteenth-century New Brunswick, people “wanted religion to provide them with a spiritual experience which corresponded in intensity to the

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4.3 Exploits

physical and emotional rigors of their daily lives, so that it could calm their fears and make their efforts meaningful.”82 Feeling had to be fought with feeling, and Tractarianism was a feeling religion, albeit of awe instead of joy. And the Methodists certainly believed in feelings. They were attracted to an experiential understanding of the Holy Spirit, by a religion of the heart.83 It was through “their feelings” that they believed that they could know God, as Boone noted. But while Methodists thirsted for this experience of salvation, many staunch evangelicals adamantly opposed it, believing that it was not according to scripture. For instance, when the clergyman Ernest Sall was visiting Upper Amherst Cove on the Bonavista Peninsula, a man came running towards him. He said he felt conviction of sin, so Sall “told him he should believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” He said he did believe in Jesus and loved him. And then, said Saul, “Fearing that he was looking to himself, expecting to have some sensible assurance that he was accepted of the Lord, some indefinable feeling, such as many of the Wesleyans look for, I told him he must not expect such.” However, stalwart Anglicans did not accept what their clergymen were saying and went instead for the “indefinable feeling.” Boone despaired that his counsel was having so little effect in Twillingate: “It is exceedingly difficult to persuade men of a certain class, particularly the young women, that that is not the religion of Jesus which produces such violent contortion, such exclamation, first of terror, then of joy and which enables them at last to pray, I need not say with what utterances, without form of words and without a book.” As one told Boone during an April revival in 1869, when she and several communicants left St Peter’s Church, “I feel it now and no man shall tell me it is not of God.”84

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It is a question, of course, why feelings instead of bare propositional truth became so important at that juncture. Was it part of a search for a distinctive self as an individual, a flowering of individualism, as Ernst Troeltsch has suggested? Was it a reaching for security in a life on the margin, on the frontier? Was it a popular assertion against hierarchy and class, whether clerical or mercantile? It was a democratization of Christianity, since it was no longer erudition but nearness to God that gave spiritual status.85 Of course, Methodism also had it theological propositions, not the least of which was its Arminian perspective. Arminianism with its immediate, practical, and urgent call to salvation seemed to have had a greater appeal to families whose very lives depended on their abilities to cope with their situations in a challenging environment. Its concept of immediate contact with God through an experience of the Holy Spirit was much more electric than belief in contact with God through the laying on of hands of a bishop who claimed the ability through a nearly 2,000-year-old Apostolic Succession. That belief was made even more remote by the remoteness of the bishop himself, who appeared during a day in the busy summer every three or four years, but generally was either far off in St John’s or even farther removed in Bermuda on the way to the Carribean. When he did appear, it seemed to not only the Methodists, but to Protestants in general, that the bishop of the Church of England hung his resplendent vestments and the weight of his episcopal authority on a very slender hook. What made matters worse for the bishop and his clergy was not only the experience of the Holy Spirit in revivals, but that the revivals were not instigated primarily by Methodist missionaries. Rather, they were an integral part of a popular movement of vernacular Methodism. Still up against them in 1869, Boone analyzed his situation: “It is not so much the Wesleyan Ministers as the people who are successful in drawing away our people.” His analysis was corroborated by many other Anglican clergy. His colleague at nearby Exploits–Burnt Islands, reflecting on how Methodism had trebled in Notre Dame Bay and had “obtained the majority in all the principle settlements north of Twillingate,” reasoned that they were successful because “almost every male Wesleyan (and many females in addition)” were local preachers, while the Church of England had a single clergyman, lay reader, or schoolmaster in each community. George Chamberlain, at Moreton’s Harbour, agreed with him. And so did Bishop Feild himself, who, reeling from the bite that the Methodists had taken out of his diocese, especially in the Moreton’s Harbour Mission, which extended from Tizzard’s Harbour to Cape St John, wrote sardonically, “The Methodists, who by their class leaders and prophetesses are busy everywhere, have made much havoc of the flock in this mission, driving some out of their senses and many out of the

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Church.”86 Of course, they were not driven out; they were drawn out, as Boone stated, attracted to the experiential salvation of the Methodists. If the Church of England could not hold their own in Twillingate with minister, magistrate, and merchant on their side, what could they do in the rest of Notre Dame Bay, where in most places they had little money, power, or influence? They were losing ground in Twillingate itself, though they still had their own clergyman and magistrate, John Peyton Jr, who was also in charge of whose name went on the Poor Relief list.87 The Slades mercantile house of Poole had given much support, and, unlike most English firms who sent agents, one of the Slades actually resided in Newfoundland. John Chapman could write in 1839, “Our Church affairs, both at Fogo and at Twillingate have been benefitted materially by the assistance and influence of John Slade Esq., the eldest son of Robert Slade of Poole in Dorset. This intelligent and well-disposed young gentleman arrived here about last May or June, and the weight of his influence, which is considerable here, he has taken care to give to the interests of the Church of England.” He contributed small sums to the Church of England around the bay, such as £10 to the new church begun in 1841 at Nipper’s Harbour, one of the few places holding their own against the Methodists. That was nothing compared to the £700 he promised toward the tower being added to the church at Twillingate.88 And that was not all. Robert Slade gave a silver communion set to St Peter’s Church. John Slade acquired the “excellent chandeliers and branches” from St James Church at Poole and shipped them to Twillingate, and also donated two “very handsome” slate tablets of the Ten Commandments, and the Creed and Lord’s Prayer.89 John Slade Jr not only gave financially. He vigorously gave his support to thwart the Methodist advance whenever he sensed an opportunity. When he heard that they were planning to build a chapel in Twillingate, opened in May 1843, he and the collector of customs, Andrew Pearce, contrived a stratagem to cause the most injury. The man who gave the land for the church owed Slade money, so the plan concocted was to wait till it was built and then “seize it” for payment. A woman sympathetic to Methodism overheard Slade and informed William Marshall, the missionary, “who had the timber removed into the field of another Methodist who was not in debt.” But he did not give up. After the church was opened, a later missionary, John Reay, speaking of John Slade, wrote, “A merchant … named Slade … gathered a company, and after plying them with rum, and seeing them furnished with a bottle and two or three glasses, and also with a few pickets from the fence, went along with them to the meeting, where they soon began to pass around the glasses and to indulge in ‘a few remarks’” until they were thrown out by some “stalwart, broad-shouldered, brawny-

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armed” Methodists. Marshall appealed to the magistrate, John Peyton Jr, but he told him that he had to look after himself, for he had no authority to preach anyway. Thus the Church of England elite, the merchant, magistrate, collector of customs, “all the great men – the honourable men – of the harbor,” as Reay called them, attempted in vain to maintain their hegemony over Twillingate. On the occasion of Chapman’s departure in 1843 they lamented the departure of one who was “so interwoven” in their “temporal and spiritual welfare” and deplored the recent “dissent in our hitherto undivided community.”90 It was Slade’s cannons that fired at the consecration of the new St Peter’s Church a couple of years after the Methodists had branched out on their own.91 What was he thinking when he ordered the cannons fired? Did he simply mean them as celebratory fireworks to echo on earth the joy of heaven? Was he rejoicing that St Peter’s was to Twillingate what St James was to Poole back home? Were there wheels within wheels of meaning? Were the echoes reverberating off the hills of the harbour a desperate assertion of the firm’s mercantile hegemony in the face of its fading reality? Were the loud blasts a statement to the Methodists and their schism that importance and power and spiritual significance still belonged to the Church of England? If so, it was in vain.

notre dame bay Whatever the contributing factors were, the people, not just of Twillingate, but of Notre Dame Bay, reached for and obtained that “indefinable feeling” in numbers that often left the evangelical Anglican clergy shaking their heads in desperation. The people of Tizzard’s Harbour, between Twillingate and Moreton’s Harbour, nearly all converted to Methodism. When Boone visited in 1869 he could find only three or four families who had not done so, and they were “only parts of families.” The Anglican tide had gone so far out that Boone in disbelief wrote that even “the wife of the husband who keeps the key of the Church is a Wesleyan now.” This did not mean that they had totally severed themselves from the Church of England. When Boone did come to town for the key, the Methodists would come out to his service, but their hearts were not in it. Their eupeptic faith had vanished. There in the pews in front of him was a large congregation, but only two individuals repeated the Prayer Brook responses, and the rest just stood there staring at him in that blank bovine fashion, “seemingly looking on as if they had no part in the service. All the singing I had to do myself.”92 Neither did Moreton’s Harbour hold much promise for the Anglican cause. When Bishop Spencer arrived in Notre Dame Bay in 1841 in the war-

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ship hms Cleopatra, with its twenty-six guns, he estimated that he came just in time to rescue its 400 inhabitants, for they were “on the very eve of becoming dissenters.” He hoped that as a result of his visit they would “now continue firm in their attachment to the Church.”93 He also hoped in vain. Bishop Feild consecrated the new and bigger church that Spencer hoped would “inviolably” attach them, but when he returned in 1849 there were distinct signs of an absence of a monolithic Anglicanism in Moreton’s Harbour. First of all, he discovered that “the two principal planters are Methodists.” Then he found that the parsonage – which was to be the home of the first missionary and his wife, John Jr and Lilias (Moore) Kingwell – had a leaky roof and was left in “a very unfinished state … There are no rooms upstairs, and no stairs.” And when he held confirmation, only five individuals attended. He “sailed immediately” to another community.94 Kingwell, a graduate of the Theological Institution with its new Tractarian emphasis, did not have much success and was able only to present his bishop with seventeen candidates for confirmation on his next visit in 1853. Feild felt it was disgusting for Methodism to “mar the beauty and peace of the Harbour” as it did. He was not comforted by the church being full, because Thomas Fox, the Methodist missionary at Twillingate, and Edmund Botterell, the superintendent from St John’s, were arriving that very evening, “and the same people who had attended the services of the Church this morning, hoisted their flag in honour of them and their Mission.”95 Fox and Botterell walked from Tizzard’s Harbour and Botterell jubilantly reported later, “All the services were seasons of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.”96 Little Bay Islands, one of many fast-growing communities in the nineteenth century, was another case in point. When Henry Daniel, the Methodist chairman and superintendent, visited in the fall of 1858, he judged that “this island may be called Wesleyan ground,” since the recent census showed that of 128 residents there were 112 Methodists and 16 of the Church of England. By 1869 the population had nearly doubled to 246 Methodists, with just one mortal holding the torch for the Church of England. What can account for this demise of “the church of our forefathers”? Many who settled there migrated from such places as Tizzard’s Harbour and Twillingate, which had Methodists in significant numbers. That said, they also came from Herring Neck, which at that time was largely Church of England. And the Methodists were not only making enormous gains in Little Bay Islands. The censuses of Newfoundland for 1857 and 1869 show people leaving the Church of England in droves, as Methodists doubled and sometimes tripled their numbers, even between censuses in such places as Exploits–Burnt Islands, Black Island, Change Islands, Seldom, and

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Musgrave Harbour.97 Methodist leaders themselves were astounded. The Methodist missionary John Reay exclaimed in 1875, “Nowhere in Newfoundland has the progress of Methodism been so rapid as in Green Bay [Notre Dame Bay]” and noted later that he could have given “many refreshing particulars.”98 If there was something about life on the margin propelling the growth of Methodism, then most places in Notre Dame Bay were even more marginal than Twillingate. John Chapman, back in 1826, deemed that the people of Twillingate were “considered superior in their manners, and also in their religious knowledge, to many of the neighbouring harbours” and too assuredly attributed that superiority to the work of his predecessor, John Leigh.99 With such English merchants as the Colbournes and Slades it was the trading centre for most of the bay. Moreover, many of its outports were increasing rapidly in population. Thus S.D. Clark’s explanation of people’s desire for security and association as major factors for the growth of Methodism in frontier Canada could apply to Notre Dame Bay. With such pronounced migration in the bay, largely to islands, people found themselves in localities without their traditional systems of religious and social ties and felt this loss keenly. It was Methodism that “served as an effective socially reorganizing influence.”100 Anglicanism, encumbered with its focus on clergy, liturgy, church structures, and sacrament, was ill-adapted to a migratory environment, and Tractarian Anglicanism even more so. In contrast, Methodism focused on God’s presence among people as they met together for mutual support. The place of the meeting was largely a matter of indifference. When Henry Daniel encountered the thriving Methodism of Little Bay Islands, he was struck with both the crudeness of their meeting place and the quality of their spirituality. He had come from that part of St John’s Methodism that was well ensconced in its respectability. The brand new edifice, Gower Street Methodist Church, with its brick, stone, and slate, its arched windows and ornamental belfry, and “space for a large pipe-organ,” was its latest iteration. His sensibility was affronted when in the centre of Little Bay Islands he came to what was merely “a small erection of round sticks covered with bark rinds, which they call a chapel.” But he found as he preached there that he “felt more freedom and power” than back in St John’s. Similarly, he was astounded at a prayer meeting on Exploits–Burnt Islands where men and women prayed freely from their hearts. He wrote, “Seldom has it been my privilege to listen to prayers more intelligent, fervent, and powerful than we had at this prayer meeting.”101 In Methodism not only could the people pray extemporaneously. Any man or woman could stand up and preach in a fishing stage, store, or

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kitchen and be recognized immediately for the spiritual gravitas that he or she carried. This freedom as an exhorter was quite in tune with the levelling of social relationships experienced on the frontier. The people themselves had practically converted the whole of Little Bay Islands to Methodism before the missionary James Duke spent the winter there in 1860 and long before they had received their first official “local preacher” in 1864 in the person of John Saint of Bonavista. By then any plant of the Anglican variety was hard to find. Ironically, when there may have been just one or two remaining, the Methodists were administered a missionary minister to preach conversion full-time. A mitigating circumstance was that he was also to preach at “adjacent places in Green Bay.”102 Little Bay Islands already had received visiting preachers. For instance, “believers were filled with unspeakable joy, and the place in a manner was shaken” when Thomas Fox dropped in on his way to Labrador in the summer of 1861 when the population was rapidly expanding.103 Such visits were the exception. In the previous decades people on their own had exhorted and converted each other in their net lofts, boats, and kitchens. Since at least 1852, when a large migration to the island was beginning, they had a local class leader whom John Brewster, missionary at Twillingate, appointed. This person, William Anstey, who had moved from Twillingate, led services on Sunday and soon formed a class of twenty.104 Class meetings, often in kitchens, were ideally suited to the frontier environment, requiring no special buildings and no clergy. Thus the people engaged in a vernacular Methodism of weekly fellowship, prayer, instruction, and counsel under the leadership of a fellow fisher who took responsibility for pastoral care. As the population expanded and the need arose, other men and women volunteered as leaders. In 1863, the year before Saint’s arrival, there were six class meetings, three of them led by women. One of the members was probably Fanny Cox, formerly of Twillingate and born there in 1829. A neighbour at Little Bay Islands said of her, “She found God’s work sweet, and ever delighted in praising His name.” Five of the leaders had the surnames Mursell, Anstey, and Roberts. The Mursells had migrated there from Herring Neck and the Ansteys and Roberts from Twillingate, probably in the 1850s, after having wintered there for a number of years already, as resident Thomas Grimes said his family had done.105 There were a few places on the western side of Notre Dame Bay that did not turn to Methodism. It is ironic that Feild was more relaxed and joyful in these remote and less-developed outports than he was in larger centres, where his penchant for Tractarian ceremony and love of Gothic architecture could be more fully satisfied. His spirit was deeply moved by the faith of “the principal planter” at Ward’s Harbour. The man had built a small

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church at a personal cost of seventy pounds and he asked Feild if he would consecrate it. He told the bishop that he had to care for his neighbour through a long illness and finally bury the person who helped him plan and build it. With “deep and right feeling” he shared how his neighbour “had been wild” in his earlier life but in his last three years was of “an altered character.” Feild granted the man’s request. He cast aside all his requirements of “order and uniformity.” He flung to the wind all his meticulous instructions about chancels and raised altars and lancet windows, and, stirred in the depths of his being by the spirituality he had encountered, he went ahead and consecrated the structure – “only a wooden room, twenty-four by eighteen, with five square windows.” And it then became a church of the Church of England. He explained to the readers of his journal, “The little wooden building was duly consecrated … with all due devotion … if not with all the formality and circumstance of such services, in more favoured or more wealthy localities.” He gave them the apologetic that the “devout fishermen … in a remote Harbour of Newfoundland” with this simple ceremony were as able as those with “the more splendid processions of our native country, to testify their zeal of God’s house, and of His holy name.” After the consecration, Feild said, “We walked together to some of the lovely harbours or ‘Arms.’” And as they walked, bishop and fisherman, Feild was so inspired by the man and the setting that his excursion was transformed into a pilgrimage. In the only instance of such in the historical record, instead of being a bishop he became a fellow traveller and was thankful to receive “some instruction” from “the worthy planter.”106 Feild could not find many Anglicans on that side of the bay, but he found a few more at Nipper’s Harbour at its western extremity and was impressed with their “considerable opulence and respectability, living in decent homes and many comforts.” They all came on board the Hawk for a service, “a most respectable and attentive congregation.” Still, it was at “beautifully picturesque” Leading Tickles that Feild once more encountered “well-disposed and earnest-minded” Anglicans, who surprised him and warmed his heart. Here was another people left fending for themselves who took responsibility for their own spirituality, and they seemed to be doing better without clergy than those who had them. About eighty of them, the largest congregation ever, came aboard the yacht for a service. He was overwhelmed with the faith and dedication of “a respectable planter, who has read the Church Service to his neighbours, and kept Sunday School without fee or recompence for fourteen years,” first in his house and then in a store he purchased for that purpose. The man wanted to be officially licensed as a lay reader, but Feild thought that he might not know what he was asking. He told him that if he acquired such, he “would have to bind himself by cer-

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tain rules and regulations, whereas hitherto he has been quite free and independent.” It is profound that these were the two values that Feild saw himself as contradicting. It seems that Feild thought for a moment that he might be better off without the licence. Farther on “up the Tickle” was the brother of “the worthy chief planter of Ward’s Harbour.” He and his wife were the first to settle there and for five years were the only residents. Yet they were “kind and courteous” and “zealous about their Church.” Their house was “neat” and they would not let him go without milk and bread. Feild could not understand how people so removed from Twillingate or St John’s or England could be so exemplary. There was not a hint of falling into barbarism. He began to wonder if people dwelling apart, living a life of “separation from the jealousies and suspicions of marts and markets,” caused them to be nobler instead. Remembering all the fights he had over Tractarianism and evangelical Anglicanism, not to speak of Methodism, he was impressed with the peace of the place, with its absence of “strivings about the truth.” But then it came time to leave “the pleasant Tickle” and to head eastward, where he had to face the prospect of Methodism and a divided Anglicanism once more.107

fogo island The Slades were also present in Fogo, that other mercantile centre in Notre Dame Bay with a population about 40 per cent that of Twillingate.108 Ironically, though it did not receive an Anglican clergyman until 1841, nearly twenty-five years later than Twillingate, it lost few members to Methodism. That trend continued for nearly the next two decades. The major battle in Fogo was not with Methodism but within Anglicanism itself. Bishop Aubrey Spencer, as part of his northern initiative, arrived aboard hms Cleopatra in the summer of 1841 and landed the first Anglican clergyman to Fogo, James Harvey, whom he had ordained the year before in St John’s.109 Up to that time they had been served by a diligent lay reader, James Bell, clerk of Robert and John Slade & Co. of Poole. He took a larger role upon himself than lay reader for the Church of England, for he also served diligently as a catechist and Sunday school teacher. It was news of his departure and rumours of a Methodist missionary coming to the area that prompted an urgent appeal for a clergyman at Fogo. Harvey had a brand new church waiting for him, which Spencer consecrated on his way back to St John’s in August 1841.110 But Harvey did not stay long and the people of Fogo were sent six more in the next sixteen years. A number of them complained of a lack of spirituality in Fogo, but when Spencer sent the next clergyman, William Bowman, it must have been the people who

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were doing the complaining. Bishop Feild simply said that the man “is a drunkard,” and when he returned from Bermuda in 1845 he had already determined that the people of Fogo had had enough and that Bowman should “be removed for ill conduct.” Even so, it was not straightforward. Though he was “convinced” that Bowman was “given to drink,” he would have a difficult time proving it, because there was “conflicting evidence” on the matter, and to make matters worse, the evidence on both sides was under oath. Moreover, if he was successful, both Bowman and his family would be “ruined,” and Fogo without a clergyman would immediately be “seized on by the Methodists.” Though he had St Peter’s to consecrate in Twillingate, he said he never would have gone north that summer if it were not for Bowman. When he met him he was saddened to see how far a clergyman could fall: “Poor Bowman! if ever a man was to be pitied he was … I found a man physically, mentally, I fear, I ought to add, morally degraded, not to say ruined.” The only thing positive was that he himself could see that he must “quit Newfoundland.”111 Feild had a new clergyman in Fogo by September 1845 in the person of W.J. Hoyles. He had spent some time with Hoyles just after his arrival and was impressed with “his earnest manner and … his simple mode of life.” However, he was too Protestant, for when he preached at St Thomas’s, Feild wrote that the sermon was “too much in the old presumptuous way of justification.” Hoyles earnestly requested Feild to ordain him priest, but Feild told him that he had to wait until September, the time for ordaining.112 It was at Hoyles’s September ordination that Feild gave his rigorous Tractarian charge of Order and Uniformity to the clergy, and Hoyles must have taken it to heart. Certainly James Winter, sub-collector, did not buy into the new Anglicanism that Feild and his first clergyman were bringing to Fogo. He had a row with Hoyles, ostensibly over fencing a grave within the graveyard, and wrote a letter to the editor of the Public Ledger in 1847 telling all about it. It seems that the new trend in cemeteries coming out of St John’s was not to allow such. Thus Hoyles saw individual grave enclosures as “one of the old customs which ought to be abolished.” Winter had fenced the grave of his child, partly to keep out dogs. Hoyles ordered that the paling be removed, “he with his own hands assisting in throwing it over the churchyard fence.” According to Winter, this did not endear Hoyles to the people of Fogo. He said that they deemed it to be “so heartless and revolting an act, that nearly every one in this settlement shudders at the bare mention of.”113 The cemetery altercation was in fact part of a larger local quarrel with the hierarchy of the Church of England. Winter believed that Hoyles was getting back at him because, as he said, “I, in the discharge of a sacred duty

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as a member of the Church of England in this land, did oppose, and as God gives me the ability, will oppose every attempt to introduce changes and innovations in our Church and service.”114 It is quite obvious that, for this resident of Fogo, church was a serious matter. He was careful to point out that he was not a Methodist, a Congregationalist, a Baptist, nor anything else. Winter saw himself rather as a devout member of the Church of England dug in to fight the Tractarian architectural and liturgical “innovations” that he felt were assaulting his faith. He had just come back from St John’s, no doubt reinvigorated in his stand, having heard of the stir Feild’s changes had caused there at the parish church before the fire and were still causing at St Thomas’s. But Hoyles was not able to stay in Fogo and fight against Winter for long. In the summer of 1848 his wife died in childbirth, and because he was “much dejected,” Feild transferred him to Brigus and sent Ernest Sall in his place.115 Bishop Feild made his second visit to Fogo during the tenure of Hoyles in the late summer of 1846, arriving from St John’s a couple of months after the devastating fire. Still new to Newfoundland and with images of England vivid in his head – its buildings of stone, its courtyards, and domesticated landscape – he stood on the deck of the Hawk and looked around Fogo harbour and nearly shivered at the sight “so foreign and strange.” It was almost as bad as what he had left in St John’s. Still recoiling from the experience, he returned to his cabin and in romantic revulsion composed a verbal assault on the place to his Tractarian friend, Edward Coleridge, assistant master at Eton: “The most barren and unpoetical imagination could hardly descend to a scene so bare and desolate as this island of Fogo – a mere rock of bluff heads and huge boulders, with occasional patches of grass in the valleys, but not a tree or shrub of any kind. The houses are all wood, and generally coloured red, and all stand, as do the churches and other buildings, on sticks or shores.” Not that he noticed anything offensive about the people. To the contrary, he said that they were as willing to receive instruction as parishioners of Dorset and Devonshire back in England. The problem facing the missionary who desired to give it was that they were scattered on different islands pursuing the fishery and that “many of them retire into the distant woods in winter,” circumstances certainly not unique to the Fogo mission.116 It is difficult to find out how the people fared under Earnest Sall, their third clergyman, the first being a drunkard and the second possibly too pliant in carrying out Bishop Feild’s “wishes and views” delineated in his Order and Uniformity. Feild himself did not prefer Sall. First, it is clear from his written reports he was evangelical. When he later went to Bird Island Cove, and Mrs Clouter told him there were not six Anglicans left in the place,

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and no one showed up for service, he very tellingly wrote, “Not that I supposed my time would be ill spent in preaching to Wesleyans … for I would consider it an honour and a privilege to proclaim to any number of men, regardless of what sect they belonged to, the glorious truth of the Gospel.”117 As an evangelical Anglican, his main difference from the Methodists was his belief that an emotional high did not necessarily accompany conversion. When a man from Upper Amherst Cove, near Bonavista, came running up to him “under conviction of sin and greatly troubled about his everlasting peace,” he assured him that since he believed “that Jesus Christ died upon the cross for sinners” he was “born again.” After warning him against expecting “some sensible assurance that he was accepted of the Lord, some indefinable feeling, such as many of the Wesleyans look for,” Sall went on to say that, instead, the inner evidence of conversion was a thirsting for holiness. And in an emphasis not found in Bishop Feild’s writings, he said that when a person comes to God, “through faith in his beloved Son, he becomes his Temple” through the Holy Spirit. Feild generally spoke of “Temple” as a building. For instance, in speaking of St John’s Church, he wrote, “I have determined upon certain alterations and additions in the Parish Church, which seem of pressing necessity, though we hope in a few years to have it replaced by a new and more commodious and more comely Temple. There is no Font!”118 Sall was more like James Kelly, Feild’s later coadjutor and successor. Kelly did help Feild with his cathedral, but he was not preoccupied with his Tractarian architectural focus on Gothic space, for in his understanding it was not required for spirituality. While worshipping at Englee he was so moved by the popular spirituality he found in the place that he remarked, “True devotion is independent of externals; and oftentimes the Missionary on these coasts is privileged to see such reality and earnestness in joining in the too rarely celebrated services of the Church, on the part of the poor, simplehearted fishermen, as would put to shame many worshippers in their beautiful and costly churches at home.” Similarly, at Salvage he was struck by both the well-cared-for appearance of the church and the “orderly and devout demeanour” of the people, which showed that the former “was not bestowed … to the neglect of the living stones of the spiritual temple.”119 The ministry of Sall is a clear illustration that Bishop Feild, though “punctilious,” was not able to control the kind of Anglicanism that was promoted in his diocese. Sall arrived at the beginning of his episcopate and attended his Theological Institution while Blackman was still principal. He was evangelical, and Feild was quite aware of it, and in a rare instance, named him as such. But Feild was not impressed: “He is also an Irishman … ‘Fit body to fit head.’”120 He called him “fustian.” When clergymen com-

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plained that their quarterly reports called for so much dry repetition, Feild told Hawkins that if they did not do that, they would have to “draw upon their fancy or invention, like brother Sall.” He had a journalistic skill in reporting narrow escapes on the northeast coast, which Feild belittled, implying Sall himself was the hero in these stories. He was jealous that Sall had gained relative fame in comparison to his archdeacon, that “the people in England are admiring him for his jumps from pan to pan of ice,” while “such a person as Bridge, who does ten, twenty times as much work as Sall, is thought little of in comparison, because he has no accidents to relate by ice or sea.”121 Feild might have also considered that the reports of Bridge first trumpeted evangelicalism, and that his turning to Tractarianism did not do much for his reputation in many quarters.122 Regardless, there seems to be no bombast in Sall’s reports. They effectively give voice to the participants by detailing their daily encounters, and often letting them speak in the first person.123 Sall was not Tractarian and therefore did not please Feild, since he was without the desired composite of traits that included a reclusive piety, reserve, dismissive attitude to the Reformation, and a leaning toward medieval spirituality. What did the people of Fogo make of Sall’s ministry? There is evidence that he was not aloof from his congregation. He preached extemporaneously, which was by far the more popular form of preaching.124 It is likely that he had a hand in launching a Sunday school picnic in 1850, “the first of its kind that was ever given in Fogo.” He was an avid participant. Several boats “decorated with flags of different colours” took the students from William Cox’s wharf to Lighthouse Island (Simms Island) at the eastern entrance to the harbour, and on their way out they were “saluted by guns from Mr Lawlor’s establishment.” Sall had a tent and “his own flag” flying on the island, and there they were “regaled with tea and plum cake … served by the teachers.” They then played games until the sun was going down, when they were “assembled and again treated to sweat cakes and sweatmeats.” After singing a hymn of praise they all got back in the boats and returned to Cox’s wharf and on the way were saluted by guns once more, while parents and friends who had “ascended the hills” took in the view. According to the newspaper story, the harbour was “in a state of excitement,” and it portrays minister and merchant, parents and children, at least on that day, in “unity and concord.”125 Certainly it was an uncommon good news story amid the poverty of 1846–50. Despite the shining promise of the Sunday school picnic, matters did not transpire well for Sall in Fogo. In the fall of 1853 Feild sent him to Bonavista, and the reason he gave for his removal from Fogo was that “his own people in his Mission are entreating me to remove him from them on ac-

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count of his neglect of them and general inefficiency.”126 Feild, in saying “in his Mission,” could have been referring to people outside of Fogo, such as at Change Islands or Barr’d Islands, if they were not receiving the visits they felt they were entitled to. Then again, Sall took sick leave in July 1853, and when Feild visited in August he was quite alarmed that the Methodists were coming to Fogo. The superintendent from St John’s, Edmund Botterell, was actually in the harbour when Feild arrived, and “the local teacher” at Twillingate had made “some visits.” It is possible that Feild listened to those discontented with Sall and decided to move him because evangelical clergymen were not doing well against Methodists, and Thomas Boone at Twillingate was a good example of that. Not that there was much Methodist stirring in Fogo up to that time. A layman was having services in his house, and when Botterell preached, it was crowded; but what might have worried Feild, if he knew, was the Methodist anticipation that his counterpart entertained for the “hundreds of Protestants in Fogo.”127 Furthermore, Johnstone Vicars, the superintendent of the nss said in 1855 that Sall was a zealous supporter of the society, so this would mean that he had also been such in Fogo and was attempting to found a nss school there. Regardless, Feild gave a totally opposite assessment of Sall seven years later, saying that he bore “willing testimony to the zeal with which he has laboured in his sacred calling.”128 And “zeal” was a highly prized value with Feild; he used the word to describe two of his missionaries that he esteemed most, Mountain and Le Gallais. After being stationed among the people of Fogo for some months, the next missionary, William Elder, didn’t think they were spiritual at all. He complained in his 1854 Christmas report, To a casual observer it would be pleasing to notice the regularity with which most people come to Church, especially on Sundays and some of the Festivals, as Xmas, the Circumcision, Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday. They seem to “take delight in approaching God,” but I have now been here long enough to be painfully aware that with the greater part it is only a superficial service … It may well be supposed that this has caused me much anxiety, much grief, much searching of heart, and many prayers. I have dealt faithfully and plainly with them, but the only sensible improvement I can as yet perceive is that they are somewhat more decorous in their behaviour whilst in Church. The Service is not so often interrupted by their noisy entrance after its commencement.129 What are we to make of this? Were the people in the pews as shallow spiritually as he claimed? One wonders why they were so punctual in crowding

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their church, and not just on Sundays, if they were so spiritually uninterested. It is possible that many were committed but “unfeeling” Protestants who were not practised in solemnity. Elder, recently educated in Tractarian devotion at Feild’s Theological Institution, like Moreton at Greenspond, was out of sympathy, and possibly out of touch, with the cadence of their spirituality.130 Their pre-Feild church was not Gothic, and they had not cultivated the “awe” that Tractarians so desired.131 He was more pleased with the Anglicans of Change Islands, but even there he spoke of bringing “real religion” to them to inoculate them against Methodism.132 Whatever the reason, the missionaries whom Feild sent were having a difficult time with Anglicanism in Fogo. For instance, Reginald Malcolm Johnson (1860–67) complained constantly about the lack of spirituality of the people in the pews in front of him. They came to church just out of “mere formality.” They committed “many acts of irreverence.” They had “a sad apathy about real and inward holiness.” They had “an entire absence of heartfelt love to God or devotion to his service.” They had “nothing beyond the form, the shadow of religion.” They had no “religious vitality.” Was he just carping? He went to Fogo under protest after he came to St John’s from Forteau under the mistaken expectation of being ordained priest, and it was too late for him to return to Labrador. When Feild appointed him to Fogo, “he stoutly refused,” saying that “it would kill” his pregnant wife. But Feild, reporting the event, said, “I was equally as stout, and … insisted, and they went.”133 On closer scrutiny, one is warranted in questioning Johnson’s generalizations about the people bearing their religion lightly. For instance, after mentioning that he had to “put up with many acts of irreverence,” such as people standing, leaning over pews, and sitting when they should be kneeling, he noted that “the irreverence is chiefly confined to those who, from position and education” would be expected to do otherwise. This sounds more like the merchant or the sub-collector than it does the average fishing family of Fogo. He also stated that they were acting “from an idea of involved respectability.”134 As for the people generally, he admitted that they avidly attended the church service. When the church door was open, they were there. And they did what they could to support the church. When Slade and Cox donated the materials to add a tower, the “pewholders … at once took upon themselves their share of the good work.”135 One has to wonder if the issue was that the people were not exhibiting that Tractarian spirituality in which Johnson trained at Feild’s Theological Institute, like Elder, his predecessor.136 He spoke of the people much like Bishop Medley of New Brunswick, who faulted Protestants in general, and in particular their “failure … to promote general habits of worship … one sees frequently people

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enter the House of prayer with an easy air of indifference, sit down at once, as at a place of secular resort, cross their arms, and recline in cushioned ease, in comfortable pews, the service going on, as it is called, without their taking any visible part in it … . The very elements of worship are unknown, or forgotten; comfortable ease, and something to please the ear, are the substitutes for devotion.” Well, they were certainly Anglican enough to not convert to Methodism. Johnson noted that a preacher had come to Fogo in 1862 but out of “force of habit as Anglicans,” his people did not convert.137 Was his perception erroneous? When the people of Shoe Cove, on the western side of Notre Dame Bay, said no to Methodism, their missionary, George Chamberlain, praised them for their valiant stand, saying that they deserved “the highest credit” for being so “determined not to abandon their Church.”138 It is possible that the Anglicans of Fogo were too apathetic spiritually to be drawn to Methodism, but given their engagement in Anglicanism, it is more likely that they were adhering to Protestant Church of England principles. They had not been initiated into the new Anglicanism of Keble’s Christian Year, with its theme of “quietness and confidence,” its “peculiar happiness” of possessing both “a sound rule of faith” and a “sober standard of feeling.” Keble, speaking to his “times,” contrasted his brand of Anglicanism with the “excitement” that people in 1827 were craving in their lives from religion and from wherever else they could get it. In Fogo in 1865, Johnson used the same apologetic as Keble in defending Anglicanism against Methodism. The latter was a merely a version of “popular Protestantism” and its impulse was the “love of novelty and excitement,” although by then he was calling it “inherent.”139 Tractarian Anglicans, in their effort to differentiate themselves from Protestants, Methodists, and the “excitement” of their day, lost the joy and freedom sounded in Anglicanism in the Book of Common Prayer, such as in the Jubilate Deo, Psalm 100: “O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands: serve the Lord with gladness, and come before his presence with a song.” Neither did they tune in to the joy in their Calendar readings of the New Testament. Anyone who “entered … into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God,” as in the appointed lesson for 6 April, would have been considered irreverent and would have been ordered out or told to sit down and be quiet.140 The Anglicans of Fogo were too free and too at ease in church. Johnson, like Elder, would have them as silent as mice. But having been accustomed to the more relaxed church ambiance of joy and freedom, they found it difficult to accommodate their spirituality to a monochromatic Anglicanism of solemnity. When Coadjutor Bishop Kelly came by in 1870, he seemed quite pleased with the congregation at Fogo, saying

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that there was “good attendance, and much right feeling.” The year before, they had built “the handsome large new chancel … and fence” and added a bell, which Christopher Meek said, “give proof of the zeal of the men of the place.” He said that, in fact, “they give too liberally, considering their small means.”141 Methodism appeared to become a threat in Fogo in the 1869 census when it jumped to nearly 20 per cent of the population.142 In the 1860s Methodists made a concerted effort to bring light to “the large dark place,” as the missionary John S. Peach once called it. In the 1850s a family hosted public worship in their house, and a missionary attempted to visit for a day or two each year. When Edmund Botterell, the district chairman, visited and preached in 1853, they had not seen a missionary in three years.143 There were converts here and there. For example, when Thomas Harris visited from Twillingate in 1861, he preached in the house of a man name Pope, who was converted while “in the bay” during the winter transhumance. News of a revival taking place in the area reached St John’s, and it seems this was the impetus that moved the Methodist District Meeting, the following year, to make Fogo the centre of a new circuit and to assign the local preacher, Thomas Fox, as a missionary to it.144 There was a bit of a flurry in the town at the arrival of Fox, a man with a passion for revival.145 Of course, some who had been attending the Church of England left to hear him. But although Fox preached, as he said, “with all my might” and “many had been the hearers,” yet “the people for the most part are afraid that I am going to break up their establishment, Episcopacy.” Thus Fox was left disappointed and still “praying … for the mighty arm of God to be made bare.”146 Nevertheless, a revival did come shortly to Fogo and it riled up Bishop Feild. In exasperation he vented to Hawkins, “The Methodists have lately spawned at Fogo, which till within three years, was entirely free of them, and by their revivals, as they do everywhere, have bewitched the foolish fishermen and divided them.” But, as Johnson saw it in 1865, not much became of Fox’s efforts. He concluded that most of the Methodists were not new converts but were recent migrants to Fogo. “Wesleyanism has now had a fair trial, having been over two years and a half in the place. A small Meeting house has been erected … but (so far) only one pewholder has vacated his seat in the Church, and I do not think that, including all the newcomers into the harbour (who strange to say have all been dissenters) and all the lukewarm church people who may go to meeting occasionally, the meeting house congregation ever exceeds some fifty persons.”147 Johnson called Methodism in Fogo just “a great nuisance,” but he may have been more worried than he let on, for he proceeded to outline how

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the social structure had changed to favour the Methodists at the expense of the Church of England. He was losing both the status and the material support of being associated with a mercantile firm because the Slades were on the decline. John Slade, the ardent contender for all things Church of England, had long since died in his youth.148 It was the Duders out of St John’s who were on the up and up in Notre Dame Bay. Edwin Duder supported the Church of England. When Bishop Feild visited Twillingate for nearly a week in the summer of 1861, the mercantile firm bestowed him with “various acceptable presents of fresh meats, vegetables, &c.” On the other hand, Edwin’s brother, John C., was an active member, even a local preacher, for the Methodists at Twillingate. And Thomas C., the agent for the firm at Fogo, educated at the Wesleyan Academy, St John’s, was “among the foremost” lay workers for Methodism. Emily (Haddon), his wife, was their organist and song leader for ten years. Bishop Feild, instead of calling this changeover just a “nuisance” to the Church of England, concluded that “our Church is now divided and desolated.”149 If that were not enough, Methodists were beginning to make their presence known in government services. The Protestant Anglican James Winter was replaced as sub-collector at Fogo by John G. Lucas, “a decided Wesleyan.” Johnson was disgusted that he had to contend not only with Lucas as a local preacher and class leader but also with “his daughters going about tract delivering and praying.” Neither was all of the opposition to Lucas restrained. At about one o’clock on Christmas morning, some men attacked him and his wife at their home, calling him a “Ranter,” after they had broken “the window-sash and glass of the Wesleyan preaching room, and three panes of glass and the bar of one sash in the Wesleyan Parsonage.”150 Farther afield, the new colonial secretary, John Bemister, replaced James Crowdy, a steady supporter of the Church of England and former member of the committee of the ncs. Bemister was a committed Methodist who often chaired meetings of the Wesleyan Missionary Society. Seemingly familiar with how government officials played their cards in the past, Johnson predicted Bemister would now use his influence “to appoint Wesleyan Education boards, Wesleyan schoolmasters, and to divert Educational funds to Wesleyan purposes.” And if that were not enough to stomach, the Methodist John Haddon was appointed as Protestant school inspector.151 Bishop Feild had protested his appointment to the governor with ingenious sleight of hand: “I feel considerable difficulty, after reading your Excellency’s communication, in recommending any person in opposition to Mr Haddon, lest I should do him injustice or an injury, which, however little I like or approve him, I would not do on any account. I may, however, mention that the Rev. Mr Wood, and another gen-

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tleman who signed Mr Haddon’s application have expressed to me their regret at having done so.”152 But Feild’s protest was to no avail, and out in Fogo Johnson felt that the Church of England had taken another loss. The mission of Fogo for both the Church of England and the Methodists did not refer to just the “metropolis” itself, but also to its “outharbours” – for instance, Change Islands, Indian Islands, Barr’d Islands, and Seldom – and it was in some of these that Methodism found more fertile ground.153 James Harvey made eight visits to Change Islands during his first year in Fogo, but by then a vernacular Methodism had long been established, despite the efforts for the Church of England of such lay readers as William Oak and Edward Downton, who also served as catechists and Sunday school teachers.154 Fishing families had been coming to Change Islands during the summer for years from Cupids in Conception Bay and had brought their Methodism with them. “Upwards of two hundred,” they already had a house for their meetings and Sunday services, which the missionary John S. Addy preached in on his reconnaissance to Notre Dame Bay in the summer of 1841. They were having a prayer meeting in it actually on the day he arrived.155 They did not all return to Cupids in the fall, Rebecca Taylor, and William and Mary Ann Taylor, for instance, thus growing the population of Change Islands. It was Rebecca Taylor, “our leader in this place,” who provided spiritual and pastoral oversight in her class meetings. When she died in about 1843, it was not William, but Mary Ann who took over leadership, not only at Change Islands in the summer but also at Seldom, where they moved to winter quarters. Other Methodists from Conception Bay moved to Seldom, such as Henry Penny from Carbonear, a Mrs Rowe, and the wife of John Holmes, a Wilcox of Brigus.156 Thus it was mobility, and not missionaries, that founded Methodism in Change Islands and Seldom. Missionaries of both persuasions complained of this mobility, since “they leave behind them the means of grace.”157 It was the Methodist missionaries who complained the most, though ironically they benefitted, since the spread of Methodism was facilitated by it. As the missionary looked upon empty seats back in Conception Bay, he felt keenly the people’s absence, but he did not know, or did not want to know, that they were taking responsibility for their spirituality and spreading the faith to others in their migratory pursuits at both the summer fishery and on the winter frontier. Thus, although the population of Change Islands was “greatly reduced” because of winter transhumance “up the bay,” it was a place of marked spirituality. William Elder said he found it a pleasure to minister to the Anglicans there on his visits from Fogo.158 Bishop Feild was also impressed on his first visit in 1849, when he came to consecrate the church and cemetery and hold a confirmation. There were only nine or ten communicants, but

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there were twenty-seven confirmands, and he “was much pleased with the appearance and behaviour of the females; and not only of those confirmed but generally of all.” He did not seem to be too tormented by Methodists, and after a full day he and his fellow clergymen “passed a pleasant evening together in the Church ship.”159 The visit had not looked very hopeful in the beginning. They were delayed a day because they did not want to beat against a strong northeast wind on the way from Fogo, and after they landed on the north side of Main Tickle it was necessary to “walk a mile through the woods to the church.” Arriving unexpectedly they had to dismiss the carpenters who were laying the floor and “get a woman to sweep out the shavings.” Then benches had to be brought in. But that was all in the past that evening as they dined and conversed on the Hawk as the sun went down and the yacht swayed gently on its hawser in Main Tickle in Notre Dame Bay.160 He may have been too relaxed, for the Methodists were not done with Change Islands. Elder became alarmed in 1855 at the “considerable excitement among the Methodists” that he had heard was taking place, but he hoped for the best for his Anglicans. Thomas Fox found it the place of revival that he so much desired and rejoiced accordingly as the number of Methodists doubled.161 Puzzlingly, Bishop Feild steered clear of Seldom-Come-By until his fourth visit to Notre Dame Bay in 1853. He noted that most of the families were “chiefly from Conception Bay” but did not mention Methodism. He called on a few families, checked out a proposed site for a cemetery, invited “the little congregation” on board the Hawk for a service, “and dismissed them with the first Bishop’s blessing pronounced in the place.”162 It was also the last blessing that they received from Bishop Feild, for he never did return. With the 1869 census showing a sudden increase in Methodism, his coadjutor, Bishop James Kelly, finally showed up to consecrate the graveyard seventeen years later.163 Until then, each census recorded only a small percentage of the population as Methodist, yet Henry Indoe related that in 1853 “nine families, almost the entire population, united to erect a Methodist church.” But at that time someone complained and everything was stopped. Then in “about 1860” Henry Penny and Henry Anthony “went around the harbour and made a collection of fish.” All was going well until they came to the flake of young John Holmes, the Anglican lay reader, who had eighty quintals of salt fish spread out to dry that day. He would have no part in the Methodist collection and told them categorically, “Give you anything for your church? No!” Then the two Methodists were struck with an amazing case of special providence. Just as the words were coming out of his mouth, down came the structure, flake, fish, and all, crashing into the

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beach and water. Indoe said it made “a profound impression on all present.” No doubt it was told and retold beyond Seldom and up and down the northeast coast and everywhere Methodists travelled. Indoe was still telling it over thirty years later.164 It may have contributed to the sudden increase in Methodism that showed up in the 1869 Seldom census. The people at Barr’d Islands had been ministered to by a clergyman from Fogo since 1841, when the evangelical Bishop Spencer appointed James Harvey. Since the two places were in relatively close proximity, he had visited eight times in his first year.165 When Bishop Feild visited Barr’d Islands in 1849, he found that the people had combined their efforts with Joe Batt’s Arm and were building another church, this time about halfway between the settlements. They were well under way and already had “preparations” made for galleries. But Bishop Feild did not like galleries, and, although he remained with the people for less than an hour, he felt he could disregard their preferences. He wrote in his journal, “I hope to alter this design.” They may also have planned a lofty pulpit for their church, and if so, Feild, operating within his narrow Gothic measure, would have tried to alter that too. St James Church at Poole, which many would have attended before their departure from home, and after which they had named their first church, had both these features.166 Thus what he characteristically called “the Newfoundland style,” in an attempt to isolate it as peculiar and of no merit, was certainly not unique to the island, but kept alive warm Protestant associations with the southwest of England in the New World. When Feild returned in 1853 to consecrate the church, he found that the people had not heeded his wishes. He had suggested that the galleries be removed and the church lengthened, and “the people readily assented,” but now they pleaded lack of funds due to the poor fishery. They had little hope of paying the money they owed on the new church as it was, let alone pay for extensive remodelling. In this way, instead of refusing Bishop Feild to his face or rudely reminding him that he had noticed no gold lying about on the beach, they were able to leave him with his mitre intact and still carry out their own preference. He went ahead and consecrated it, taking comfort that at least in Barr’d Islands and Joe Batt’s Arm there were “no Dissenters,” that is, no Methodists, to contend with. But all was not well. It is true that “the church was crowded” for the bishop’s consecration, but for Holy Communion that followed only three communicants came forward to receive the sacrament from the three clergymen waiting at the front of the church. This was a powerful statement to Feild that what he had on offer was being refused. It left him thinking that he may have been too focused on Methodists while overlooking what he should have done “to remedy this dissent and separation in the Church” it-

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self.167 What he might have done to “remedy” it is a puzzle, since it was clear he had come up against another wall of Anglican Protestantism in Notre Dame Bay and it was his own Tractarianism that they were dissenting from. He was the bishop, yes, and it was the bishop’s role to consecrate. This they agreed and welcomed him to do the consecrating. But they also let him know that he had little episcopal leverage on the northeast coast halfway between Barr’d Islands and Joe Batt’s Arm on a quadrennial visit to Fogo Island. He and they knew that the episcopal spectacle was excellent, like a whale coming to the surface and leaping in the air on an otherwise ordinary day, but then it was gone, and the surface would not be broken again for a long, long time.168 In conclusion, when Bishop Feild hauled his nets on the northeast coast, the fish in them, while familiar, were not the kind he wanted. Even at Salvage, where there were no Methodists, unlike at Bonavista straight across the bay, the people were devoted, but they were too independent in their Anglicanism. They were a little too spirited and too focused on the Bible. Like on the rest of the coast, it seemed impossible to reign them in to meekly receive that mediatorial Anglicanism of sacramental mystery that had fermented in Oxford. Thus while Robert Dyer contentedly fellowshipped with evangelical Anglicans in Bonavista North, Julian Moreton, the bishop’s man, rarely received the deference to which he felt entitled in his self-perceived role as a hierophantic priest. Whether the topic was the interior architecture of a church or the interpretation of scripture, many Jacobs and Aunt Rachels had the effrontery to question what he said and offer a better understanding of the topic at hand. While it appeared that Moreton made headway at Pinchard’s Island with a new Gothic church, the people actually interrupted Bishop Feild and refused to let him proceed until he took action against the Tractarian cynosure Moreton had placed in its east end. Often people were away, of course, fishing elsewhere or at “winter quarters” in the bay. During those extended times their Protestant Anglicanism was nurtured by the Prayer Book and evangelical tracts given out in profusion by the Newfoundland School Society and the Methodists. While a few smaller outports such as Salvage and Pinchard’s Island remained Anglican, there were Methodists on every side. Thomas Boone at Twillingate saw a continual stream of people leave his congregation and join those reaching for ecstasy, despite the evangelical Anglicanism he maintained at St Peter’s Church. Even with the backing of magistrate and merchant, he was powerless to stop them, as they chose what they regarded was a more participatory and democratic understanding of Christianity. Whole towns seemed to turn Methodist en masse, such as in Tizzard’s Harbour and Little Bay Islands. While Fogo remained largely in the fold, they were not regarded as

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sufficiently serious and solemn. Even at Barr’s Islands, where Methodists made no breakthrough at all, the people ignored Bishop Feild’s specific instructions on the proper architecture for their new church. Ironically, at Ward’s Harbour, Feild himself seemed to forget his numerous and exact requirements for Tractarian spirituality and instead communed with fishermen who, he had to admit, worshipped “with all due devotion … if not with all the formality” of services elsewhere.

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5 Labrador: A People of “Unhappy Variance” We were obliged to beat all day, and were beaten at last; I wished to have gone to Henley Harbour, but we only came off the island by sundown, and then the wind was blowing out, and a stiff breeze. It seemed best, therefore, to stand on during the night. There were several icebergs about, which makes a good look-out necessary … In my fear and want of faith I, as usual, slept not at all. The wind was ahead, and sea heavy all night. [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation, 1849, 72–3 The Captain hoped to beat to Henley Harbour, only thirty miles, before evening, or rather before the tide turned; for it is useless to beat against wind and tide in this part of the Straits. The attempt was made accordingly; but after advancing no more than six or seven miles, by about noon, the wind failed us, and the tide carried us, nothing loth, towards our starting place … We had every way reason to be thankful that we regained our harbour; for it came to blow heavily from the north-east with fog. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1853, 27–8

forteau While Bishop Feild was at Forteau on his first visit to Labrador in 1848, he walked about the place and visited the rooms of the merchants and the house of a settler named Cribb. The information he gathered caused him to be quite forlorn. The migratory fishermen hired by the three Jersey merchants each summer were required to work on the Sabbath “if necessary,” such as to turn over the fish on the flake. But apart from that “express proviso,” they also made it a habit to wash out their clothes on Sunday and to often spend their Sunday evenings “in dancing and singing.” Feild also observed that there were women too in Forteau, who had come out from Jersey as cooks, and, alarmed for their modesty like Don Quixote among the goatherds, wrote that “it may easily be supposed … in the absence of all instruction and supervision” what ensued. If that were not the limit, “the only

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book … of a religious character” that he saw at an agent’s house was a “Report on the state of the Missions of the Wesleyan Methodists,” printed in Paris. Feild returned to the Hawk “in much grief.”1 Such was his description of the great need for a clergyman in the first place he visited in Labrador on his “voyage … of discovery … of religion and morality.” Feild wrote it not in a private diary but in one for publication, to “create sympathy” so that people would donate funds to make it possible for the need to be fulfilled.2 Clergymen of the Church of England were urgently required to warn the migratory fishermen against two great hazards that might shipwreck their souls on the Labrador – recidivism to heathenism and conversion to Methodism. Feild named these dangers as early as 1845, but he did not refer at that time to migratory fishermen from Jersey, but to migratory fishermen from Newfoundland.3 Within a year of his arrival in Newfoundland he “found whole settlements of Methodists” in Conception and Trinity Bays and soon discovered that Carbonear in Conception Bay, not St John’s, was “the stronghold of Wesleyan Methodism” in Newfoundland.4 These were two of the bays from which fishermen and their families by the thousands sailed to Labrador, and since Methodism excelled with a vernacular voice and heart and did not require a clergyman and a Gothic apparatus to heighten or deepen spirituality, it was peculiarly adapted to a migratory environment. This way is evident in George Bond’s novel, Skipper George Netman, in which a captain on the Labrador raises a Bethel flag from the mast of his schooner to invite fellow men to a service on his vessel. Several boats row to his schooner, the fishermen pray and sing hymns of the sea, and the skipper gives an exhortation, which is not of the land, and certainly not of the hills and dales of England, but is of the life experience of the fishermen, dripping with salt water. He relates his narrow escape while returning to Newfoundland on “an awful night” out in a storm and drifting toward the “foaming breakers” on the perilous Straight Shore the following day. He then addresses them directly: “Yes, friends, we are all bound home for Newfoundland, but are we all bound home to heaven?” Preaching from John 17 he presses his message, which is the need to “have Christ as our Saviour.”5 Thus the migratory fishery to Labrador became a nursery for Methodism, a vernacular spirituality of fishermen and their families that was a far greater threat to Feild than Methodist missionaries who had begun visiting the coast over twenty years before him.6 In contrast to this expression of popular spirituality of the Word, spoken directly from the heart, with or without a Bible in hand, Bishop Feild attempted to overpower the fishermen by summoning all the visual weight and solemnity he could muster on the Labrador frontier. He set up a Trac-

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tarian stage “on each and every like occasion” that he officiated in his episcopal office. At Forteau in a merchant’s store, to project as best he could the spiritual gravity of the sacramental moment, he “exhibited” the Hawk’s silver chalice and paten on a table covered with white linen. “A very handsome quarto Prayer-book and Bible” were laid on a prayer-desk and lectern created out of an office desk by covering it also with a cloth, with “a flag with a mitre” hanging down at the front for optimum visual impact. A barrel was similarly transformed into a stand for a font. Feild caparisoned in his ornate episcopal robes, and accompanied by his three surpliced vergers, Hoyles, Harvey, and Bowen, sat amidst the holy furniture and read and sang and prayed in preparation for the reception of the Holy Sacrament. But the panoply was in vain. “Alas! no person” came forward to take the sacred elements. The same setting was arranged at Battle Harbour and again with the same result, “None … presented themselves” to receive the “holy mystery” that the bishop and his priests had on offer. He had only a little more success in Sandwich Bay – there was one communicant out of the more than 100 present.7 But Feild had come with a mission to Forteau and this was just the opening volley. Yet, though his resolve was high, he was equipped with neither money nor missionaries. He had determined that Labrador was part of his diocese, though it was not named in his episcopal commission, and this first visit was a voyage of reconnaissance to inform a strategy to occupy the annexed territory.8 Still, in the summer of 1848 he was bereft of resources, for he could spare neither missionaries nor money on Labrador, being short of both for Newfoundland. The publication of an account of the voyage changed this dire circumstance when the spg offered a special Labrador fund of £200 for three missionaries in the hope that readers of Feild’s account would donate the extra money expended. While still travelling on the voyage, he wrote to Ernest Hawkins to request the spg “to provide the means to assist in conveying and securing to these people the blessings of our Holy religion.” In short order the spg Committee, chaired by Charles Blomfield, bishop of London, “unanimously agreed” to a grant of £200 per annum for five years for three missions in Labrador, one of which included Sandwich Bay. Feild felt grateful that a bishop of “the first city in the world” would take up the cause of “a missionary Bishop among icebergs and barren rocks.” He hoped that people who heard of it would be moved to donate to the spg to make up for the expenditure.9 However, Feild was worried lest he be sent men just looking for £200, instead of the exceptional missionaries of faith and commitment he needed for Labrador. He was thus disgusted when the spg Committee did not consult him but on its own “guaranteed” that amount to prospective Labrador

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missionaries, for it also made the people of Labrador feel “quite secure and careless” about paying for the services of a clergyman and thus “took away all the sting from my injunctions and exhortations,” which he had just given to them. Certainly he did not want “inferior men” to come for pay that they could get nowhere else.10 One such man, Thomas Boland, an Irishman, was waiting for him at St John’s and eager to go to Labrador when he returned from his 1849 voyage. Feild had no idea who he was and had no knowledge of his being accepted by the committee, and certainly would have turned him down if he did. But there he was demanding his £200 while Feild could only promise him £100, and he over forty years old with a family, all of whom “had not for years been in a colder climate than the ‘sweet shady side of Pall Mall or on rougher roads than Ludgate Hill.’” Of what use would he be in Labrador? “Mr Boland does not know one end of a boat from the other or a sleigh from a catamaran.” And he came without a baptism certificate. For the meticulous Feild, that would not do. He made a laborious inquiry, including correspondence with the archbishop of Canterbury over the need for a certificate and an investigation of the church records at Cork. The archbishop replied that a baptism certificate was not required for ordination. When the search of Cork records came up with nothing, Boland equivocated by telling him that they must not have looked hard enough. And then the shock. Feild was absolutely mortified to find out that Boland had never been baptized and had never been confirmed – was not, in fact, an Anglican at all. Instead he and his wife were “both members of a Dissenting Congregation, and were married in a Dissenting Chapel by a Dissenting Minister.”11 But what could one expect when the committee started waving about £200 while calling out for missionaries! Feild’s leverage as a Tractarian colonial bishop was compromised by the scarcity of missionaries. What he wanted was Tractarian clergymen, Englishmen of deep piety, out of the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, preferably the former – real clergymen.12 With such as these in the outports, his influence throughout his diocese would be constant wherever he was, whether at sea, in St John’s, or in Bermuda. But the lineup to go out to Newfoundland and Labrador seldom extended down the hall, so he had to take what he was given. And compared to the missionaries he longed for, they were a mere shadow, such as John Roberts and this Thomas Boland sent over to him by Ernest Hawkins and the committee. It required Englishmen, and of the right calibre, to carry out this colonial project, certainly not Irishmen or Welshmen. Feild was so frustrated by his mission being continually obstructed in this way that he wrote and sent a rant to Hawkins in London:

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Hear me, my friend and patron – Nobody is more fully persuaded of your kind purposes and faithful services for all the Colonial Bishops and for my unworthy self in particular, than I am, but when you reflect that all you have done, and therefore all that you have been able to do for me and my Diocese in this behalf (I mean in choosing and sending Candidates for Ordination) during my seven years of servitude, has been to steam over that wretched Welshman, John Roberts, in style which was sufficient to turn his brain, and now this poor Irishman with his Irish wife and children without an article of furniture, I do hope you will forgive me if I cannot do more than acknowledge your good and kind intentions and your endeavours according to your time and strength; and will not think it necessary to say “Your Lordship must tell us particularly what kind of men you want.” As though I were so nice and fastidious that nobody would satisfy or please me, or as though I made difficulties about trifles, or as though I would not, or did not appreciate and acknowledge with sincere gratitude your desires and endeavours for me and my poor diocese. Should I be justly liable to either of these charges if I were to say, “I do not, or rather my diocese does not, want a mad Welshman or an Irishman 44 years of age, with a wife and five children, never confirmed, and no proof that he has ever been baptized.” Is there no Englishman to be found baptized and bred in an English Church, of a stout body and willing mind, and with a heart of grace, who can have the testimony of two Clergymen and as many pious laymen to his life and conversation, his desire to be useful and his ability to be so, God helping him? If none such can be found, alas for me and my poor diocese. I believe however, that such there are, more than ever found their way, or ever will find it, to the top of your flight of stone stairs.13 Feild had a better prospect with him when he visited Forteau in 1849. Algernon Gifford was the only missionary he had available to place on the coast, but he still did so with misgivings. To the middle-aged Feild he was a mere youth: “It is cruel to him and cruel to them, to place so young a man, without advisor or friend, on that desolate shore.”14 But he believed that Gifford, while no Jacob George Mountain, approximated the kind of missionary he was looking for, full of piety and commitment, even if not of a deeply dyed Tractarian variety. And Gifford did not disappoint. At least he was no Thomas Boland – that most “discontented disagreeable person” wanted to evangelize the world, but he had “no notion” of doing it “for less than £200 a year.” Feild desperately needed a missionary to obstruct

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5.1 Church at Forteau

the Methodists at Channel–Port aux Basques, so he baptized, confirmed, and ordained the Dissenter, and sent him west to raise the Anglican flag, albeit a ragged one and raised by an Evangelical “eaten up with conceit” leading the charge.15 Feild chose Forteau at the eastern edge of the diocese of the bishop of Quebec, as the centre of his southernmost mission in Labrador. It was an optimal location for the missionary to travel west to follow the Newfoundland fishermen who ignored political boundaries and fished as far as Bonne Esperance, and to travel east as far as Red Bay. It had merchants, unlike Red Bay, which had the added deficiency of swarming with Methodists. There were five resident families in Forteau Bay, including a profitable Church of England planter named Davis, who had lived there for thirty years and was planning, reluctantly, to remove to Nova Scotia to be near the services of a clergyman.16 Lastly, and most importantly, Forteau was strategically located for the missionary to travel across the Strait of Belle Isle and minister to the other side of the parish in Newfoundland. Gifford did not appear to have any problem enduring “the trials and privations of a Labrador winter” and served in the Forteau mission for over a decade. How Tractarian a man Feild had in Gifford is open to question. He

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had an evangelical gospel emphasis in his ministry. For instance, he made no mention of a sacramental salvation by baptismal regeneration at the hypothetical baptism of Sarah Gibbons, who had migrated from the Moravian north. With an evangelical articulation that even a Nova Scotian Baptist would have envied, he stressed instead that Gibbons, through believer’s baptism, was giving a testimony of salvation by faith in Christ, for he carried out the ceremony only “after she had made a most humble and excellent confession of her faith (at my request), stating that she believed in the forgiveness even of such sins as hers, through the infinite merits of Christ, her Saviour, and that she depended alone upon His atonement for acceptance with God, and that she did hope, notwithstanding her many sins and imperfect repentance, to be saved through faith in Jesus Christ.”17 Yet he had the proper Tractarian trappings at Forteau in St Peter’s Church designed by William Grey with chancel and bell-turret, consecrated on a “tempestuous” day in August 1857. Before even the foundation was laid during Feild’s visit four years earlier, the church was already equipped with what Feild called the “necessary furniture” of a stone font and holy table.18 The ecclesiologist William Scott had thought much about building in wood instead of stone in order to adapt to the availability of local materials, and not without some angst. But he determined that the problem with the wooden churches in North America was not with the wood itself but with the architecture. Wood was prior symbolically in the scriptures as seen in the wooden Ark of the Covenant and in Noah’s ark, both of which were types of the church. It was “unquestionably the primitive element” and “therefore the stone church implies and assumes the wooden idea” and “all that is true in stone … will be found in wood.” Both, therefore, have “moral bearing.”19 These ruminations must have comforted Grey as he designed the church at Forteau, which the architecture historian Peter Coffman billed as “the most elaborate attempt Newfoundland had yet seen to incorporate the principles of Ecclesiology” in wood.20 Despite all the effort and theorizing, Gifford, a romantic, appeared to be awed more by the art of nature than that of the Gothicist one fine winter morning in 1858 when he walked into St Peter’s, Forteau: Upon entering the inner door, I was really startled at the wonderful and beautiful sight before me. From the communion-table under the east window to the stone font under the tower at the west end, including pulpit, prayer-desk, lectern, seats – every object … was covered with an uniform garb of exquisitely fine-powdered snow. I cannot describe the pure and spotless beauty of the scene. The little church is elegant enough in its simple form and outline and its correct internal finish to

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challenge some allowance of art and skill in its favour; but when nature had, as it were, crept in by stealth … one for the moment forgot art and skill, acknowledging the adoption and beholding nature’s perfect work.21 What Gifford had craved most on the frontier was to give people a reason to think that the Church of England was there to stay, something “to attest the reality and permanency of the undertaking.”22 It was the church building itself with as much monumentalism as it could muster out of its small frame that projected it, reinforced by the increasing length of his own tenure in the Forteau mission. As it was architecturally buttressed, whether for wind or show, so the Church of England was aided in asserting spiritual hegemony in Forteau in 1861 by the combined pageantry of an episcopal visit in consort with a Royal Navy man-of-war. hms Hydra, of equally fearsome name, actually towed the Hawk into the harbour. And there was not just one bishop but two. Bishop Feild arrived just at the time that Bishop George Jehoshaphat Mountain, and his son, the clergyman Armine Mountain, were visiting the eastern end of the Quebec Diocese. Thus, the people were given the privilege to behold in their conspicuous regalia “two Bishops, two Priests, and a Deacon … celebrating the full Service” at Forteau, along with Captain Richard Hamilton and the other officers of hms Hydra.23 How could it be more eloquently stated that in this end of the empire it was the Church of England, and not the Methodists or the Roman Catholics, who were the rightful British occupiers? Captain Hamilton of the Hydra eagerly took in tow Bishop Feild on the Hawk, and the latter gladly accepted his hawser, because they saw themselves as a two-pronged advance in the empire. The Tractarian Feild longed to claim the independence of his diocese from the arm of the state, yet he was eager to receive such help when it did not impinge on his authority, but instead furthered his episcopal agenda. This was true whether it was the state paying for clergy salaries in Bermuda or throwing him a towline on the coast of Labrador.24 The whole spectacle no doubt was intended for effect, and spectacle it was. But then they were gone, and their permanent absence was more real than their presence had ever been, and the evanescence of the visit more keenly felt. And in their winter quarters the only visible part of religion was now the Prayer Book, Bible, or tract, as the people relied once more upon themselves for their spiritual ministry. Yes, they were Church of England, but what were they to do with St Peter’s Church and with what they had seen that summer? The question became more acute in 1869 when the diocese abandoned Forteau and moved the mission headquarters across the Belle Isle Strait to

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Flower’s Cove in Newfoundland. After attempting for more than two decades to wean the people from their vernacular Anglicanism, preaching the absolute necessity of priest and chancel in the Tractarian iteration of the faith, the surpliced clergy suddenly cast aside St Peter’s, that Gothic idea in wood, and the congregation who attended there. There were few sightings of surplices to the turn of the century. Occasionally, a priest visited from the Quebec St Clement’s Mission to the west.25 The people were thrown back on their lay Anglicanism of the written word, to which they had become accustomed long before Feild unrolled his “flag with a mitre” in Forteau. But they had the added challenge of getting past the self-justifying ecclesiastical polity and imagery that now clouded their heads. Nevertheless, freed from onus of bishop and clergy and church, they were able once more to focus on that “bounden duty” to “at all times, and in all places” give thanks to God, whether in their winter tilts or on the wide open sea. For those in the mission outside the immediate vicinity of Forteau Bay, the adjustment was not substantial.

red bay Neither did Feild note any moral degeneracy at Red Bay, a place without merchant or clergyman that he first visited on his second voyage to Labrador in 1849. Instead, the inhabitants, some from England, “chiefly from Dorsetshire,” and others from Newfoundland, “many” from Carbonear,” encouraged one another in their Protestant Anglicanism and Methodism. In their spiritual mutuality, services were provided for free. A man named Perham, from Dorsetshire, had taught his family to read, and “they read the prayers, psalms, &c. every Sunday.” The Methodist lay reader from Newfoundland did the same. Feild said that the residents reacted with “considerable alarm” when he introduced them to Algernon Gifford, his clergyman for the coast, and in the next breath told them they had to pay for his services. Feild blamed this reluctance on their having received “teaching, for many years, from Carbonear,” but it may have had little to do with the reluctance of the Methodist Carbonear to contribute to the Church of England.26 They had learned to reciprocally meet their keenly felt spiritual needs on the frontier and were pleased with the results. And besides, Gifford was to be stationed elsewhere on the coast, so they knew that his rare visits to Red Bay would be of little use to promote their spiritual edification. They would continue to minister as before, but would now have to pay an absentee clergyman. They may also have experienced some dissonance in Feild’s messaging. His captain had let the word out to some visiting Americans that the bishop’s salary was £1,500 and that he spent it “mostly” on his

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fine vessel at anchor in the harbour. The information, accurate or not, may have spread to the stagehead and fishflake. As the women on the flakes occasionally looked across the harbour and pondered the Hawk before them, it may have further dampened any positive response to Feild’s demand that they pay for the services of a clergyman. Before Feild arrived, an American, Horatio Storer of Boston, accompanied the naturalist Jeffries Wyman to Red Bay. He described a fisherman’s service that he had attended on 29 July 1849. The sermon was “good and well read,” and he was particularly struck that the extemporaneous prayers of “two fishermen were as earnest as would have been those of the apostles of old.” But although he was amazed at the apostolic prayers, he appeared to be taken aback by the singing, which was “peculiar by far for gravity … it went beyond any of my previous experience in that line.” A large number of American sailors, also fishing out of Red Bay, attended, as no doubt did the women who “usually” made up the shore crew that gutted, split, and salted the fish, and spread it on the flakes.27 When Feild came in the harbour and they became acquainted, Storer found that he “acted very politely,” and he attended the bishop’s service also. It was quite different from the one two weeks previously. Now instead of hymn singing and lay extemporaneous prayer there was a lot of talk about the regulations for baptism, such as the particular godparent requirements for male and female children. As for the sermon, Storer seemed not too impressed with “the drift” of it, which was “the bounden duty of every one to become a member of the Church of England.” Yet he found Feild to be an interesting person. He did not spend all his time in Red Bay strategizing, planning, writing letters, praying, and visiting his parishioners. Rather in off-duty fashion, Feild invited the Americans for “a jolly time” late into the evening, “conversing upon every variety of subject – many of them such as a ‘reverend father in God’ like his Lordship would hardly be expected to know anything about.”28 A couple of days later Feild invited them back to dinner, but they were too tired from working hard all day and had to decline, so he visited them instead.29 Since there were no merchants or their agents in the harbour to socialize with, the Americans and their naturalist pursuit provided a wonderful diversion for Feild. He laid his mitre aside and enjoyed the moment, forgetting temporarily the headache of popular opposition to his episcopal objective for Red Bay. His Tractarian friends back in England would certainly not have approved his having “a jolly time” in the face of such obstacles. They would have prescribed instead the discipline of “self-denial and mortification of bodily and worldly appetites” to be spiritually prepared for the vicissitudes of the colonial mission, an example of which he

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faced in the harbour. The Tractarian Isaac Williams would have admonished, “Now there can be … no progress in religious duties without self-denial,” as would have Hurrell Froude.30 Instead of finding “heathenism” in Red Bay, Feild’s complaint was that a robust popular spirituality maintained without clerical aid or interference, by both residents and migratory fishermen and their families, namely, “some Methodists from Carbonear,” had preceded him and frustrated his mission for the place – that it would be Church of England only. As a result of being long pre-empted, some of the Anglican settlers at Red Bay wanted their church “to be open to Methodist and other preachers and teachers” in a welcoming ecumenical Protestantism. Thus the Methodists had caused “disunion” in Feild’s push for an exclusive Anglican church, and “the same leaven” had worked among the people to such a degree that “some young persons … chose to determine for themselves” and took a stand against the bishop and his plan and refused his confirmation.31 Thus Feild was disappointed in his design, for he not only failed to displace the vernacular Methodism of Red Bay but also had to wrestle with their Protestant Anglican sympathizers. He did make a visual impression going ashore from the Hawk with “bishop and clergy in their robes” and Feild steering the boat. J.B. Freer, one of the clergymen, said, “It was a grand sight, which I wish some of our English friends could have seen.” But rather ominously he noted both the waves breaking on the shore and “the deep silence of the people.”32 Feild continued to be frustrated in his ecclesiastical desire for an acquiescent people at Red Bay who were all Church of England. When his missionary Edward Botwood visited from Forteau in 1860 he reported that instead of all falling into line there was an “unhappy variance” among the people, and as a result some refused to attend his service. He pointed out to them “how very great their sins were” in doing this, but despite this clerical censure and preaching about love, he confessed, “I did not succeed so well as I could have wished.” No doubt part of the evidence of why he had failed was “the Wesleyan Meeting House” under construction in the harbour, the first in Labrador, and the Anglican one still not finished.33 Feild determined that the reason for the setback in building the church was that the people were “in great part Wesleyan Methodists.”34 But in addition, it is likely that he also had run into a Protestant Anglicanism. Red Bay was on the frontier and experienced the freedom of a diversity of views. In addition to Methodist fishermen visiting from Carbonear and Anglicans from elsewhere in Newfoundland, there were several American vessels with Protestant crews from New England, and traders from Halifax. The year before Botwood’s visit, the Methodist missionary Charles Comben reported about eighty people in the settlement, “the greater part

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of whom are Wesleyans,” who were further strengthened in their faith by another “forty from Carbonear.” Instead of being attracted to the Church of England, they cultivated a robust vernacular Methodism through prayer meetings and a Sabbath school. Comben said he stayed there for a month visiting and preaching and meeting with the class meeting, six of whom were residents and seven who were migratory fishermen from Carbonear.35 Even Bishop Feild’s appearing in full episcopal display in 1861 could do nothing to stop the flow. The man-of-war hms Hydra already in the harbour, another emissary of the empire, gave the ecclesiastical pageantry even fuller effect. Bishop Feild and Captain Hamilton of the Hawk and the Hydra acted in fearsome consort with morning service and Holy Communion on the warship. A large number from the harbour attended, so there were Methodists on board. But then it was all over. The Hawk, towed by the Hydra, gradually disappeared out of sight around the point. And the spectacle proved to be as ephemeral and as inconsequential as that of the cathedrals that Feild saw in icebergs from time to time. The Anglican cause made no gains in Red Bay, but instead went from bad to worse. Between the two censuses of 1869 and 1874 the number of people saying yes to Feild’s Anglicanism decreased from 41 to 22 while the Methodists increased from 71 to 104.36 It was weighed down by its unwieldy paraphernalia. The Methodists of Red Bay were much less hampered in their spirituality than the Anglicans, who had the encumbrance of bishops, priests, sacraments, and Gothic space as a requirement for “proper” worship. In contrast, the Methodist meeting house was a utilitarian affair, used for less than half the year, as nearly everyone had left the harbour by the beginning of November and had gone to winter quarters. The transhumance, instead of being a detriment, was an aid to Methodism, with its egalitarian focus on speaking in group prayer and testimony, and on sharing spiritual experience. In 1879 it was actually during the winter transhumance that a revival broke out, and 40 newly converted Methodists came out of the woods to the harbour and church in the spring. The trend continued into the 1880s, and the attempts of Bishop Feild to occupy Red Bay ended like the waves crashing on the shore.37

bat tle harbour It was Battle Harbour that struck Feild with amazement as he worked his way up the coast on his first voyage. When the Hawk sailed into the shelter formed by the adjacent islands of Battle and Great Caribou, off the southeastern coast of Labrador, he found, “to our surprise … quite a fleet of fishing vessels of all sorts and sizes from various parts of Newfoundland.” The settler population

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of 200 thus expanded for the summer to 800–1,000. That not one individual of this enormous crowd of up to 1,000 people came forward in 1848 to receive the sacrament from Feild and his priests speaks volumes on the spirituality of the people. While some were Roman Catholics, the majority were Protestant Anglicans and Methodists from Newfoundland. The refusal at its most basic was a statement that their vernacular spirituality was that of the Word and not of the sacrament. People were used to meeting God through the aural media of tracts, Bible, testimony, and exhortation and not through visual presentation of the elements of the Lord’s Supper superintended by a priest. A belief in the Real Presence with hieratic consecration was simply not a part of their spirituality. This difference is not to be wondered at, since their migratory pursuits generally kept them out of the ambit of the clergyman, so it was natural for them to pursue spirituality that was attainable without them. Since their Protestantism was a spirituality of the Word and not the sacrament, Feild did not speak their language. He never seemed to talk of turning to Jesus and getting saved and the joy of knowing Christ. It seemed as if the gospel had been hushed and that he wanted to hush them along with it. It had been replaced with talk about church regulations and the importance of church and clergy. Whereas before, they could meet Christ anywhere, now the clergy had taken him, and he could not be found unless one dutifully and silently followed the rites that they ordered, and in the fashion that they articulated. But in addition, the reputation of Feild as a Tractarian who prescribed a sacramental spirituality preceded him here also. His smashing and rearranging of St John’s churches in order to attain a focus on the altar instead of the pulpit had been noised abroad where they came from – not only in St John’s and Conception Bay, but along the whole northeast coast from which vessels made two annual trips to St John’s buying supplies in the spring and bringing fish in the fall. Since Feild viewed spirituality through such a clerical and sacramental lens, one has to be guarded against taking at face value what he says about vernacular religion, especially that of Protestant Anglicans and Methodists. What he interprets as apathy or ignorance may be in fact a popular protest arising from an alternate vibrant spirituality, albeit politely given, since people would have provided him the opportunity to save face as a bishop. Of course, they came to communally read the familiar Prayer Book service with him, no doubt partly out of curiosity, but they refused him precisely at the point where he obtruded himself into their democratic spiritual universe with his clerical privileged access to God through the sacrament. His episcopal robes and mitre loudly proclaimed such privilege, even if he had to put them on and appear from “behind a spruce tree” instead of from the vestry of a “proper” Gothic church.38 Yet Feild determined to plough ahead

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with his mission, despite the resounding sacramental no that he received from the people. He wrote to Ernest Hawkins that he needed three clergyman – at Forteau, Battle Harbour, and Sandwich Bay – to teach people true Churchism by establishing a phalanx of Tractarian “order and uniformity” to protect Labrador from heathenism, Roman Catholicism, Methodism, and evangelical Anglicanism.39 Yet at Battle Harbour one wonders what exactly he was protecting the people from. Feild, the first “Clergyman of the Church” to visit the harbour, noted the standard threats to the community. A Roman Catholic priest had visited seven or eight years ago and married some men to Roman Catholic women and “persuaded” the couples “to profess the Roman Catholic religion” and baptized a few children. A “methodist preacher” had visited two to three years ago and apparently got into a squabble over payments for baptism. But to what dregs of immorality had Battle Harbour descended as a result of this absence of clergymen? There were ninety-two vessels in the harbour with their crews, and many “women and girls” who were washing and drying the fish. Feild noticed that at the service there was “a much larger admixture of bonnets than at Forteau,” yet he did not find anything untoward at Battle Harbour that “may easily be supposed,” as he had with the Jerseymen at Forteau. In addition to the migratory fishermen, there were shore crews from Newfoundland working for the Slades of Poole, unlike in the past, when servants were brought out from Dorset. There was nothing about drunkenness and brawling. The only mention of anything “wild” on this frontier was that of dogs preventing the raising of a few sheep and chickens. There was not a word about any kind of Anglican–Roman Catholic warfare, as in clergy-laden St John’s. All seemed to be keeping the Sabbath, or at least Feild did not give a hint of the slightest infraction.40 The people had brought their moral and spiritual values with them and obviously did not need the supervision of a clergyman to keep them. No doubt if the bishop had not visited that first Sunday in August, there would have been several instances of the raising of Bethel flags and services read from the Prayer Book on the vessels moored at Battle Harbour and in the houses on the shore. But out of respect, they deferred to the bishop and his attendants, realizing that he would be “here today and gone tomorrow,” and that they would be back to their normal devotions on the following Sunday. Thus, the people were not “destitute” of spirituality, they were simply “destitute” of Tractarianism, the latest iteration of Anglicanism from England, and one articulated by a tenacious bishop. Feild took his first step in occupying Battle Harbour by consecrating two cemeteries as Church of England property, one on Battle Island and the

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other on Great Caribou Island. Feild had high hopes for the place as a Labrador centre of Tractarianism and was moved to a state of wonder when he providentially perceived in “a prodigious iceberg … a large and beautiful cathedral, or collegiate building, with towers, spires, pinnacles … all of glittering white.”41 The following year he had the fortune to find, not an agent of the Slades, but the Slades themselves, and with their help made plans to make Battle Harbour the headquarters of a mission from Henley Harbour to the Seal Islands. Its clergyman would be the dean of Labrador. They chose “a site for parsonage and church” and in addition made plans for a school with both a male and female teacher. Once more the Tractarian predilection that informed “the objects” of his visit to Battle Harbour was manifested. Almost as an apparition, exactly in the place where he saw one last year, was another “splendid ice-church … there rose up in the centre a tower with a lofty spire; aisles and chancel were built up, with some irregularity; but hardly more than would be allowed and admired in a spacious Gothic church.”42 Having his plans in place, all he needed was a missionary to carry them out. He thought he found such an instrument in H.P. Disney. Although another Irishman, he too was no Boland, but instead appeared “in almost every respect admirably qualified” and even attained to that highest of Feild accolades, “resembles my brother Mountain in spirit.” Yet he ended up at Francis Harbour, not Battle Harbour, since the former was the port of destination of his passage to Labrador from St John’s, and Mr Saunders, Hunt’s factor, offered him his winter house to live in. He was industrious for, as he says, he “sailed or rowed in a whale-boat many hundred miles … incessantly occupied.” He was also responsible for building “the first church on the Labrador,” which Feild himself “designed to be a model” and consecrated in 1853. But it was a poor start. Feild said it was “built under great disadvantages” and, as a result, had several “mistakes.” One was structural. In straining for verticality, it was designed with a high roof, but this pressed the walls “out of the perpendicular.” Because of “all its imperfections” it could not serve as a model church for Labrador after all. Still, for Feild, it would have been a great alternative to “a store … with a flag over an old table for an altar, and a portable font on an inverted barrel for Holy Baptism.”43 Whatever Disney’s industry, Feild must have been left wondering if he lived up to his billing, for Disney turned out to be only a summer missionary, in stark contrast to Gifford at Forteau. Feild placed him in Harbour Grace the first winter, and the next two winters he appears to have returned to Ireland. When Feild visited Battle Harbour with another missionary, George Hutchinson, in July 1853, his “first inquiry was for Mr Disney,” but he was nowhere to be found. Feild moved on to Francis Harbour

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and found that Disney had sent newspapers on a vessel from Liverpool a couple of weeks previously, but that is all was heard of him.44 How much Disney was missed by the fishermen is open to question. By 1851 the word had spread up and down the coast, “another weak device of the enemy,” that the missionary would not baptize unless he was paid a fee for baptism.45 The controversy may have been further animated by newspaper reports. It is likely that there were copies of the Record among the newspapers that vessels regularly brought with them from England to Battle Harbour, Francis Harbour, and other points on the coast. A battle with Bishop Feild over this issue of payments for baptism, among others, had been raging in the Record throughout 1850 and 1851. Many of the fishermen from Conception Bay would already have been familiar with the controversy in the Harbour Grace and St John’s papers. Disney himself had entered the fray with a letter in December 1850.46 The charge was casuistically explained away by the bishop and some of his clergymen as not being a fee for baptism, but a fee for clergy services, one of which was baptism. As Feild described to Hawkins his modus operandi, “I tell my Clergy that while they are to give their services … freely to the poor … they are at liberty to refuse all services to those who being able, refuse to make any due acknowledgment. A person of this stamp demands Baptism for his child; the Clergyman, as instructed by me, say you have not paid your church dues. I know nothing of you and will do nothing for you.”47 It would appear that the people were not impressed with the episcopal clarification, despite his protestations, for it seemed to them that whether they were paying for the blade or the handle they were still paying for the axe. And it is one thing to say that clergy services were not to be refused to any who were deemed poor. But how poor was poor? What was the yardstick? At what point in the downward spiral was baptism to be no longer refused because someone was too poor to pay? Both Feild and his commissary, T.F.H. Bridge, agreed that the fishery failed in 1846 and 1847, and that the prospect for 1849 for both fishermen and merchants was “most gloomy.” The spg in 1849 decided not to decrease, as planned, the grant for salaries to missionaries because of “the great and increasing distress among the people … in too many instances no provision could be made by the people … they are becoming poorer and poorer.”48 Bishop Feild’s second attempt to meet the spiritual needs of the Battle Harbour Mission, George Hutchinson, gave up “his pleasant and peaceful village at the foot of the Malvern Hills” to serve there. There may have been some question about the suitability of the nephew of William Wordsworth to Labrador, for he had a soft life in England, but there was no doubting his resolve and sacrifice, for he turned his back on his social capital, being “a

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well-connected Englishman,” and also gave up “a well-endowed vicariate in Worcestshire.” Like Gifford, he did not disappoint but remained to endure the winters for fourteen years, the only two missionaries under Feild to continue a sustained ministry in Labrador for more than a decade.49 He soon had a Gothic church designed by William Grey with tower and chancel, “a very striking object in the harbour,” to worship in. If he wanted to, he could have reason to complain, for its chancel was less than adequately articulated and it certainly was wanting in verticality.50 Still, the slightest hints of Gothic would have excited Hutchinson, as traces of feminine beauty may excite a man. Hutchinson was heavily into the writings of the Tractarian John Keble, like his bishop, who was “a personal friend and admirer of the poet.” Ulrich Rule, who joined Hutchinson for a year in the summer of 1863, described him as having “a very poetic mind,” who “often recited to me bits of Wordsworth’s or Keble’s poetry.” Hutchinson returned him the compliment. It is, perhaps, not coincidental that Rule, the recent Methodist, did not perceive a cathedral in the multitude of icebergs that passed by Battle Island, but instead visualized “from the cliff … one fine sunshiny morning … the stately figure of a man in a long white robe, as it were standing on the water, just on the line where the two fields met, a field of gold and a field of silver … a figure of Christ walking on the sea.”51 Of course, there were still Methodists, or people with Methodist sympathies, at Battle Harbour. The previous summer, John Goodison visited and preached, not in Grey’s church halfway up the hill, but down by the water “in a large store to several hundreds of people.” Neither were the fishermen and their families disinterested observers. The Methodist missionary stated “God owned his word,” meaning that he received what he deemed to be an overt spiritual response to his preaching, and “many wept” at the prayer meeting that followed. There was an alternate spirituality also at nearby Merchantman Harbour. Thomas Fox spent a day there in the summer of 1861 and saw “believers filled with the spirit” and “a poor backslider broken down.” When Goodison visited the following summer, he organized two groups to meet on the frontier in the intimacy of class meetings.52 Hutchinson was wide-hearted in his attitude to Protestant missionaries and felt that he and they were in a common cause. The Congregationalist missionary Charles Carpenter, who preached for conversion to Christ at Caribou Island on the Quebec side of Labrador, gave loud testimony to Hutchinson’s avid interest in his mission. He said that he had received “very cordial and cheering letters” from Hutchinson, who himself “preaches the Gospel in many different harbours.” In one of his letters he told Carpenter, “My heart is sometimes cheered by seeing the effects of Divine Grace ac-

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companying the word.”53 Thus, while Hutchinson had a Tractarian aesthetic, he also delighted in the Protestant focus on the Word preached. When Hutchinson began his ministry, he had no candles in the parsonage and “only two teacups, and both these cracked” with which to entertain Bishop Feild.54 No doubt that was what evangelical Anglicans and Methodists thought Tractarians had been drinking from all along. It must have been especially what the Methodists of Henley Harbour and Chateau Bay thought Feild was drinking from the day they went aboard the Hawk during the previous visit in the summer of 1849. He had intended to sail there from Forteau but he “beat all day” against the wind, spent a sleepless night, and ended up off Battle Harbour instead. On his return south he did make the harbour, and the fishermen asked his advice on a rare instance of violence on the coast – a neighbour had a “furious” temper and had “twice fired at them, once with a ball, and a second time with shot.” Feild determined the matter was not in his line of work, did not suggest much, and wished that he were somewhere else “with people to whom the Church services would have been of greater value.” Despite the fact that “nearly all were Methodists,” they crowded his vessel to hear him speak, even though he refused their offer of the house where the Methodist preacher held his Sunday services in the harbour. Feild came out of the cabin “robed,” and to their utter surprise, when it came time to preach, instead of receiving a homily on Jesus, they were fired on once again, not with a ball or shot, but with the apostolic succession from both barrels. Feild determined he had a captive audience, so he decided to give the Methodists “something about the constitution and requirements of a Church, and preached a discourse on apostolic doctrine and fellowship, from Acts 2:41–42,” a text that referred to a crowd that had gathered to hear the Apostle Peter himself. The blast did not endear him to the people of Henley Harbour and Chateau Bay. Neither did his treatment of “Mr Vatcher,” their lay reader and preacher, who had attended the service. Vatcher had asked him for a book of sermons, but Feild said he would have refused to give him one if he had it. He deemed that fishermen never had proper apostolic authority to read the sermons of apostolic ministers. Earlier, just before the Feast of St Bartholomew, Feild had denied a couple their request to be married, because he “refused to allow a Clergyman to be … put on a level with the fisherman who would have been employed if we had not been here.” He may have been remembered for one good deed in Chateau Bay, however. He went on shore and ministered to a woman who was ill, “the wife of Moses Clarke, jun. from Carbonear, and therefore probably a Methodist.” He did not do so immediately but thought about it awhile and came to the conclusion that it was not “necessary or becoming to decline such a service, under such cir-

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cumstances, upon the suspicion, or even the certainty, of her being brought up in error and heresy.” Anyway, it was all because of the wind, or lack of it, and the current that he was there in the first place, and had not been able to proceed to the Anglicans of Quirpon. So he was stuck where he was – “Certain it is I was not here of my own choice.” But he wondered if he might “have been detained” by providence that the Methodists might get a glimpse of the real Church through its services.55 The tale they reported back in Conception Bay and elsewhere that fall may have not been what he had in mind. Meanwhile the Methodists continued to thrive. Feild returned in 1853 and visited most of the Protestant families, “all of them from Carbonear … and all, I believe, Methodists.” When their missionary, Charles Comben, visited Henley Harbour in the summer of 1859, he found that a woman from Carbonear was already leading a regular class meeting, that mainstay of Methodism. Comben’s recommended strategy for Labrador, with its scarcity of missionaries, was to “preach wherever he can get a congregation, and to arrange and encourage Prayer Meetings and Class Meetings” to carry on the work in his absence.56 Whatever the Methodists were up to, Feild was committed to the southern Labrador coast. Having consecrated the churches at Forteau and Battle Harbour in 1857, he was back again in 1859, the fifth visit in just over ten years, but he came to Forteau only to take the Giffords away and land the Johnsons in their place.57 This turned out to be a poor trade, since Johnson came in midsummer and left again in September. Johnson was eupeptic in his description of the place, with its “really pretty Bay” and “with three Jersey Establishments (all as white as white-wash could make them), some other houses, a church whose spire pointed heaven-ward and a parsonage, all picturesquely situated along the shores, the latter surrounded by nice and profitable gardens in a high state of cultivation.” But he wrote this description of Forteau in December from Fogo, where he was sent against his will after unexpectedly arriving in St John’s in the fall, mistakenly thinking he was to be ordained. It was too late to return to Labrador, so Feild sent him to replace Elder.58 Abandoned, also unexpectedly, the people of the Forteau mission had to fend for themselves spiritually, as they had done before the tenure of Algernon Gifford, until Feild sent Edward Botwood, still a student at the Theological Institute, from Battle Harbour to them for the summer of 1860. When he arrived he was taken aback to find that the church was “full of flies” and that “the doors of the out-offices were blown down, and the hinges broken; the weeds, which were high, and rank, covering everything.” The physical chaos was a symbol of the “lamentable state of the spiritual

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affairs of a Mission left to itself,” without the continual care of a clergyman. Not yet ordained to minister the sacrament, Botwood focused on the Word, becoming so involved emotionally while preaching the gospel that “my feelings at times stopped my utterance, and some of the people cried.” As he visited from place to place, for example at Pinware, he “read and expounded the Scriptures” and “had the evening prayers.”59 Botwood and Hutchinson had travelled to Battle Harbour, not with Feild in 1859, but with the romantic writer Louis Legrand Noble, who was seeking icebergs in the north with the romantic artist Frederic Edwin Church. The American painter had just two years earlier returned from capturing the heroic in the mountains of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in the southern hemisphere. They sought “reverential awe,” not in Gothic cathedrals but in nature itself wherever they could find it in epic form.60 Thus at least three of them were birds of a feather. Much as J.M.W. Turner, who is thought to have tied himself to the mast in a storm to experience what he painted, so Hutchinson, said Noble, walked out on Battle Island to “a lofty precipice … during the wintery tempests. His quiet description of the terrible grandeur of the scene, was truly thrilling.” How much the fishermen and their families sought out the “terrible grandeur” is unknown, but it is doubtful that they did so at all. Making a living through fishing and sealing was odyssey enough, and for women as well as men. Noble came upon this reality while divagating about in his new setting. He happened upon “a chasm called a cove” and was welcomed by a fisherman to come in for “a bit of tea.” While sipping it, he found that the fishermen and his family came each summer from Carbonear, and had been doing so for thirty years. But the knowledge he acquired went beyond the travelogue genre of novelty and surprise. Noble came away realizing how his own life of ease was so insulated from the daily reality that the family faced. He was shaken by how utterly the fisherman inhabited a world apart from the one that he knew: “His life had been a struggle for food and raiment: such was the tenor of his brief history. Four children were with him; four were in a better world.”61 In such a life the “terrible” presented itself unsought and unwelcomed. But it was likely without the element of “grandeur” that attended the experience of adventure-seekers who attempted to escape the ennui of middleclass life by travelling to view storms on Battle Island from a secure vantage point. Fishermen were involuntarily caught in them and feared for their lives, lost them, or were left to mourn. Life had an edge. It is likely that the man from Carbonear with whom Noble had tea was a Methodist and that he had a testimony of faith like that of another Methodist fisherman from Twillingate: “I have been exposed to death in stormy nights at sea; I have known the sorrows of men expecting to see their vessel founder in the dead

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of night; I have lashed up my helm, lain-to with reefed sail, and cast myself on deck, anxiously awaiting the morning star; and I have sprung up with joy the moment I saw the morning-star, confident that we should soon make the harbour. But the joy of pardoning grace was unspeakably greater, when the light of the Spirit of God was as the morning-star to my soul.”62 It is possible that this was his second trip to the area that year, for he could have been on the ice off Battle Island as a sealer in the spring. Some years later in that actual vicinity, an April storm arose not unlike the “wintery tempests” that Hutchinson ventured out on Battle Island to experience. Captain Robert Dawe and a crew of sixty on the sealing vessel Huntsman of Bay Roberts ran onto a reef in a fierce storm in the dead of night near Cape Charles. Forty-one perished that night and twenty, including the captain and his son, were members of the Church of England at Bay Roberts. The sealer, Solomon French, a Methodist, was cast upon Fish Rock: “Talk about religion, sir, I felt thankful then for my interest in Christ, an’ I was as happy as I am in this room this minute. I was standin’ there holdin’ on by the topping-lift, when she struck, bow on, against the rock, an’ as she reeled back from the blow, her stern went right under the sea an’ ice, and I found myself rollin’ over an’ over among the breakers that were dashing up over the rock. I couldn’t have thought it possible, sir, for a man to live a minute among that pounding, grinding ice an’ sea, but I did. As it dashed me up on the rock, I got hold of the kelp an’ stuff that was about it, an’ held on for dear life. But the sea came in and dashed me away. Again, I got hold, an’ again the sea carried me away. I got another grip, however, an, held on, desperate … There I was, alone on that wild rock, drenched with icy water, bruised and bleedin’ from the awful beatin’ I had had when cast ashore, holdin’ on for dear life in the darkness and storm.”63

sandwich bay Hutchinson worried in 1864 that people living in Labrador beyond the Battle Harbour Mission were “almost entirely destitute of the means of grace.”64 Sandwich Bay to the north still had no Anglican clergyman. Bishop Feild wanted to send a missionary to Sandwich Bay after his visit there on his first voyage to Labrador in 1848. During that visit he did not come upon any heathenism or immorality. Instead everyone seemed to be living in peaceful coexistence. There were families from Newfoundland and men from England. The local Hunt & Co. agent, Mr Goodridge, read the church service every Sunday and had made a determined effort to “civilize” the Inuit. They had not only adopted Christian ways but had also taken to wearing European-style clothing such as “dresses, shawls and

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gowns” instead of the “cloak, or cope, of sealskin.” Feild was impressed with the work of the Moravians, for he found that the Inuit who had migrated to Sandwich Bay were “intelligent,” and he was also struck with their reading and hymn singing. He and his clergymen did the usual round of baptizing and marrying, and consecrating, on this occasion, a graveyard. He articulated the essence of his mission to Sandwich Bay as that of ministering “his Holy Word and Sacraments,” but when he offered the Holy Communion, only one person in all of Sandwich Bay came forward to receive it. This would argue that they were largely satisfied with the Anglicanism they observed before he arrived. The bishop did not appear to be stressed over it but instead was rather delighted as he went on a ramble and “luxuriated in bake-apples” and enjoyed “the clear sky overhead and the soft elastic moss under foot.”65 If the people were led to believe that this was the beginning of a new initiative of the Church of England in Sandwich Bay, it was a false expectation. Feild could simply not obtain a missionary for Sandwich Bay, although he kept calling for one.66 In 1858 he was worried that he would lose the missionaries he already had to the south, for Gifford was agitating to leave Forteau and Hutchinson was somewhere in England. He bared his soul to Hawkins: “On the Labrador there seems a likelihood of an entire abandonment. I do not know whether Mr Hutchinson is dead or alive; and if the latter, whether in England or on the Labrador. Wherever he is, he is out of his mind; and the misery I endure about his Mission, in my entire ignorance of the state of things is greater than I can describe.”67 Possibly in response to this cry of despair, the spg Committee met once again and passed another motion. They resolved a second time to fund a missionary to Sandwich Bay, this time “at one hundred pounds for the next three years,” and to pay his passage out from England. But it was all to no effect. They had to do with the rare visits of Hutchinson and Coadjutor Bishop Kelly, until Francis W. Colley arrived in 1885.68 Meanwhile the people of Sandwich Bay continued their spirituality without the bishop or his clergyman. Feild was back in 1857 and found everyone observing the Sabbath, not catching salmon, nor spreading fish on the flakes, nor out on the water fishing, despite the fish being “most abundant,” yet he charged those who did not come to the service with making the day one of “entire idleness.” It is likely that some did not come because they did not prefer Bishop Feild’s theology. Feild did not offer his main episcopal service, confirmation, because there had been no clergyman there before his arrival to prepare candidates. He engaged in the usual baptizing and marrying, and consecrated another graveyard, but was remarkably silent on Holy Communion.69 Is it possible that the people of Sandwich Bay, focus-

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ing on those aspects of Christian worship that were available weekly, made a statement that the sacrament played no significant role in their spirituality. It seems that while one communicant approached Feild to receive the sacrament on his first visit, no one did on the second. Thus Sandwich Bay is a testament to the resilience of lay Anglicanism of the Word, not to apostolic ministry of the sacrament. Feild came upon further evidence of keen vernacular Anglicanism in a man named Warren to the south of the proposed Sandwich Bay Mission at Indian Tickle. Totally of his own initiative and expense he had built a “commodious” church “for the benefit of the crew of the numerous vessels that resort to that place in the summer.” Ten years after the Hawk, Commander William Chimmo came by and visited Warren in hms Gannet. Chimmo gives a much clearer picture of Indian Tickle, including its spirituality, and it can be immediately seen that the settlement was not a promising site for Anglicanism of the Tractarian brand. Warren, a justice of the peace and “a large fish-owner,” told him that up to 3,000 vessels with about 30,000 fishermen frequented the tickle, since it was a “highway” to the north and south. Not all made it back home. The doctor of the vessel inquired about one fisherman he had attended back in Newfoundland, and was startled to hear that he was “dead and pickled,” the body being preserved in salt for burial back home. In addition to the migratory fishery, there were about 800 residents, of whom “half were Romanists, the other half … Wesleyans, Presbyterians, and Protestants of the Church of England.” Since the Roman Catholics had their own church, it was to an ecumenical Protestantism, which included the Church of England, that Warren was ministering. He showed Chimmo the drawings for a larger building, which would cost £500, and implied that the delay in construction was due to “some mistake” that Bishop Feild had made. He had since applied to the nss for financial help, to no avail. Not that money was scarce. Chimmo said that members of Warren’s firm “had retired with £40,000 each.”70 To the north at Bluff Head in Hamilton Inlet was another thriving centre of lay Anglicanism led by a settler known as “English Tom.” Francis Colley found the Englishmen who had been on the coast since the 1840s in good form. Tom’s Sunday habit in the summer was to raise his flag for service both morning and evening, and the migratory Newfoundland fishermen would attend. Once again it was an Anglicanism of the Word and not the sacrament. Any resident or migratory fishermen who wanted to could call people together and lead in the Prayer Book service. “English Tom” was such an example. He was contented with his vernacular spirituality and even bolstered the spirits of the clergyman when he came. Colley said that he was “a splendid old fellow … and often cheered me up.” He

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long had yearned to take the Holy Communion once, before he died, and his desire was fulfilled back in 1878 when William Shears paid a summer visit from Bay Roberts, the first clergyman of the Church of England to visit Bluff Head. Colley, the clergyman, brought division to the ecumenical Protestant faith on the coast. He noted that even as late as 1887 the fishermen, both Church of England and Dissenters, were glad to see Colley and came out to his services. But it seems that he was not glad to see them, for he complained that the migratory gatherings of Newfoundlanders in the Labrador fishery, with the absence of clergymen, became “nurseries” for “all sorts of schismatical teaching” such as Methodist “Ranters” and, more recently, the Salvation Army.71 That was certainly true. The Labrador fishery had been a nursery of Methodism all along. For many, it was a short step out of Protestant Anglicanism into the Methodist boat. According to an 1859 letter to the editor of the Provincial Wesleyan, “A new day has dawned upon Labrador. The revival spirit has been carried thither by hundreds from our shores, and has been developed in a manner to cheer and gratify the visiting missionary. Meetings for prayer and christian fellowship have been regularly held in many places.” It had happened before on a lesser scale. In 1846 John Addy reported that fishermen from Brigus had continued their “prayer meetings” on the Labrador and were successful “in keeping alive a spirit of piety among them.”72 From the late 1840s to the 1860s there were extensive revivals on the northeast coast, from Conception Bay to Notre Dame Bay, from which Newfoundlanders, many of whom who had been together on sealing voyages, sailed again to engage in the Labrador fishery, such as from Brigus, Carbonear, Catalina, Bonavista, and Twillingate.73 Methodist fishermen, without the need of top-heavy Tractarian ceremony and architecture, and without any hieratic censure against extemporaneous prayer and preaching, held their meetings with ease and freedom, on shore and on the decks of their vessels. A clergyman of Notre Dame Bay, George Seymour Chamberlain, exclaimed in frustration, “The Methodists are so energetic that it is almost impossible to keep pace with them. Every one of them who can read is considered qualified to discharge the duties of a preacher.”74 This they continued in Labrador. Chamberlain was in error in one aspect: in an oral culture the preachers did not need to be literate. In 1860, Henry Daniel, the Methodist district chairman, heard the Labrador report of the missionary Charles Comben, who had visited there in the summer, and Daniel was able to triumphantly state, “In several places the good effects of the revival of last winter in Newfoundland were very manifest. The people collected together for worship and held religious services among themselves without the presence of

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a Minister and I have been informed that several conversions to God have been the result of these services. Thus the work of God continues to extend.” It further extended, no doubt, by spreading to Anglicans who came out to hear Comben in such places as Henley Harbour and Cape Charles. In the former place, Comben reported, “I found not one individual to whom the visit of a Methodist Preacher did not afford pleasure.”75 When Coadjutor Bishop Kelly came by in 1870 looking for “Church people,” he “could only discover one family, a widow with seven children, for the rest were Wesleyans.” Still, “about a dozen” people showed up to hear him, and his main battle was not with anything theological but with the trial of preaching while swatting “numerous and troublesome” mosquitoes.76 Colley used his Labrador account in the Mission Feild to appeal for more priests so that “Church people” would have more consistent sacramental and “catholic” ministry than that provided by “a hurried visit.” He was alarmed that most inhabitants in the Sandwich Bay Mission had “never entered a House of God” and went on to say that the only way they could hear “the way of salvation” was by “the occasional visit of a priest.” Of course Protestant Anglican and Methodist and Salvation Army fishermen did not agree with him. All along they had been bringing a robust evangelical Protestantism to the Labrador coast from Conception, Trinity, Bonavista, and Notre Dame Bay, lay reading Prayer Books services, preaching, and exhorting on the decks of their vessels, and most recently beating on a drum, to call one and all to the “the way of salvation.” They certainly did not agree with Colley that because they were without Tractarian priests they were “in darkness.”77 Feild had to beat against the wind of Protestant Anglicanism and Methodism in Labrador. But that was not all. In 1858 a new Protestant impulse was introduced to the coast, that of a Congregationalist mission, established by an American, Charles C. Carpenter, in the region of “Southern Labrador” immediately to the west of Forteau Bay. Having come to Salmon Bay from Massachusetts in 1856 on a Newburyport fishing schooner for his health, Carpenter returned to Boston with a sense of urgency for a missionary to be sent to evangelize the fishermen who came annually to the area. Through the American Board of Missions he was referred to the Canada Foreign Missionary Society (cfms), formed largely by members of Zion Congregational Church in Montreal, who decided that he was the most suitable candidate and funded him as a missionary in 1858. In that year, between the two episcopal visits to Labrador by Bishop Feild in 1857 and 1859, Carpenter travelled from Salmon Bay and Bonne Esperance as far east as Henley Harbour, giving out gospel “tracts, books, and papers.”78 These publications were the product of an enormous nineteenth-century pan-

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5.2 Bonne Esperance fishing room

Protestant evangelistic effort through print by such organizations as the British and Foreign Bible Society, American Tract Society, Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, and Religious Tract Society. The last saw it as their mission to promote the “evangelical principles of the Reformation.” Their printed material was to contain “nothing to recommend one denomination” but instead to focus on the gospel. “Every tract” they published was to contain “some account of the way of a sinner’s salvation.” It should show “the method of a sinner’s recovery … by the atonement and grace of the Redeemer” that the reader “might plainly perceive … he must be born again of the Spirit, justified by faith.” That aim was in accord with the constitution of the cfms, which pointedly stated that the focus of the mission was “the glorious gospel,” conversion to Jesus, and not “any particular form of Church order and government.” As Carpenter travelled along the coast, he also “held simple religious services,” which were attended by nearly all the inhabitants in each place. “Several times” he encountered Methodists, “Wesleyans from Conception Bay,” and when he did so, “praying men and women took part” in the services. After his journey he settled on Salmon Bay as the site for the mission and built a school, place of worship, and parsonage.79

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Newfoundland fishermen and settlers came west of Forteau Bay within the border of Quebec to fish and trap. There they mixed with migratory fishermen from New England, Nova Scotia, and the Magdalen Islands, some of whom became residents, along with emigrants from the Channel Islands and England. Many were from the latter, either directly or via Newfoundland. In the 1870s, for example, several families from Burgeo and West Point, La Poile, decided to remain in Harrington Harbour.80 To Carpenter they appeared to be “influenced and benefitted very much by anything said, written, or done in the fatherland – and an old English paper or periodical is esteemed a prize.” He raised the Bethel Flag on Sundays, and the service was generally crowded with fishermen in the vicinity who exceeded 1,000. Many also came to the prayer meeting in the afternoon and often “a pious sailor ‘stands up for Jesus,’ praying … and exhorting both shoremen and sailors to accept his precious Saviour.” In addition to boarding schooners to hand out gospel literature, Carpenter sent packages of tracts and books via vessels travelling along the coast. For instance a Newfoundland Methodist family came to Salmon Bay to fish in 1861 and visited on Sundays, and he sent packages with them on their return home, as he did with American fishermen who were going along the coast of Labrador on the way north to finish loading their vessels.81 In 1860 Bishop George J. Mountain decided to set up a mission on Quebec’s Lower North Shore after reading Gifford’s accounts at Forteau. And news of the Congregationalist presence of Charles Carpenter in 1858 was likely also a large factor in his decision. He failed to make his planned reconnaissance in the fall of 1859, but received information from “a leading resident on the coast” on ten places with one to eight families.82 In 1862 he appointed Frederick Cookesley as spg missionary to the area, and Cookesley included in his report that there was an “American Congregationalist” on the coast. Congregationalists or Independents traced their roots to the Puritans and did not have the attachment to Anglicanism that Methodists had. The Puritans referred to Anglican Prayer Book services as “dumb reading.”83 Congregationalists, like evangelical Anglicans and Methodists, ardently believed in conversion, but for them it was not attended by extreme emotion. They also considered it a matter of grave concern when “nominal religion” or “external attachment” to religious rites appeared to be substituted for the need for conversion. When Cookesley, the Anglican missionary, called on a man named Askell and asked to baptize his child, and Askell “objected, saying repentance was necessary,” Cookesley wrote in his diary, “Carpenter has evidently taught him this.”84 The second missionary, Jane Brodie, who first joined and then replaced Carpenter, was even more alarmed at the need for conversion being ob-

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scured by “dependence upon empty forms.” Brodie, a Congregationalist from Montreal, in remaining on the Labrador coast by herself during the winter, was deemed by the Montreal Witness to have displayed “a Christian heroism worthy of all honor,” and her missionary spirit made her “the sailor’s ideal of a Christian woman.” She taught school and led services during which she read the “plain Gospel sermons” of the evangelical bishop of Liverpool, John C. Ryle, and of the Baptist preacher of London, Charles H. Spurgeon.85 Brodie was unimpressed with the Anglican clergyman John P. Richmond, when he came by baptizing without requiring any apparent spiritual accountability from the candidates. She had particular difficulty with his baptizing adults without taking time to teach them “what their souls needed.” She informed the mission society’s secretary, William Stewart, that she confronted Richmond on the spot, right there in front of the people. It was a dramatic encounter: “Pardon me if I usurped authority. But there was no one here to do it. After the service was closed, I said I had something to say to the minister, and I wanted the people to stop and hear. I asked about what he was doing and what effect it would have on the people, as he was teaching baptismal regeneration, I would have to expect a great change in their conduct. He was teaching the people that the Church could confer what the Holy Spirit alone could work in the soul. When he cited the prayer book, I referred him to the Bible.”86 In this way she took a stand against the accent on baptismal regeneration that was a Tractarian trademark. Brodie chose well which theological debate she would go to battle over. In a later article on “Canon Pusey,” the Congregationalist called it “in truth the key of the whole system in its relations to individual life” and questioned how the Church of England could still be regarded as Protestant under such a ritualistic perspective.87 It would appear that Brodie got the best of Richmond. The people listening began to ask questions about the rite, with the result that “he did not get much to do here.” This is not to say that the relationship between the Congregationalist mission and the missionaries of the Church of England was all static and sparks. There had been a more “fraternal” relationship with Methodist ministers visiting Labrador, such as in Carpenter’s dealings with John Goodison. But Carpenter also informed the cfms that he had received “very cordial and cheering letters” from Hutchinson at Battle Harbour and called him “an excellent and devoted English minister” who “preaches the Gospel.” Jane Brodie visited families at Forteau in 1865 and while she was there, she was “very kindly received” by the spg missionary Robert Dobie. Carpenter found him to have an “earnest, evangelical character.” Dobie and his wife visited by komatik in March 1867 for friendship and fellowship with Margaret

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Macfarlane and Samuel Butler, who had replaced Brodie and Carpenter, and they had such respect for the mission that they left their daughter with Macfarlane and Butler to attend their school.88 Bishop Feild was still in England in March 1867, having travelled home the previous year on the Great Eastern when it returned from the triumphant Heart’s Content transatlantic cable voyage. In December 1866 he had an ordination service at Exeter with Bishop Henry Phillpotts, the Tractarian of great notoriety for his refusal to ordain the evangelical Charles Gorham a priest because he did not agree with the bishop’s belief in baptismal regeneration.89 While Feild was cementing his Tractarian ties in England, his unfinished Tractarian tapestry was already unravelling in Newfoundland and Labrador. His appointment of the evangelical Robert Dobie shows that he had to take the clergy who were available to him. It also demonstrates his failure, after two decades of effort, to erect the monolithic Tractarian configuration of Anglicanism that he had envisioned for Newfoundland and Labrador. The Gothic structure at Forteau belied the evangelical Anglicanism within its walls. In Sandwich Bay, at the other end of the mission, there was no structure at all, not even the faintest trace of a lancet window. Battle Harbour alone, with the help of Grey and Hutchinson, was his most successful effort to leave a Gothic footprint. But even there the trail was difficult to find, for it was overrun by Methodists, Congregationalists, and evangelical Anglicans – migratory Newfoundlanders and free-spirited Americans. In such pluralism and mobility the Tractarian effort was nearly as ephemeral as the perception of Gothic cathedrals in the icebergs that floated by, the project as futile as an attempt to contain them.

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6 Placentia Bay: A People with “a Vigorous Self-Activating Culture” All I believe on board expected when we ran upon the reef, as we were going fast before the wind, and were brought up (as the sea phrase is) all standing, that the vessel must have stove or sprung a leak; but beyond scraping and bruising no injury appeared to be done. The tide providentially was down when she struck, and after lightening the vessel, by taking out the anchors, and the two brass guns, and letting off all the water, we rose with the returning flow, and continued our journey with glad and grateful hearts. When afterwards we grounded in entering a Harbour we again remained two hours upon the rocks, but we did not strike with the same violence as in the former instance. These circumstances made an examination of the keel and bottom of the vessel indispensable. Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, April 1852, a249, spg What … caused our Church to be rudely entered by night and the candles, therein displayed, cut into pieces and strewed all over it? What caused two-thirds or more of our congregation to desert it for months, and split and divided the inhabitants of the place, father against son, and mother against daughter? Why the answer is easily given, Tractarianism and all its concomitant evils. Collett, The Church of England, No. 2, 7

an assault by bishop feild on an evangelical anglican outport Harbour Buffett, an outport formed in the nineteenth century by a population migration within Placentia Bay, arose from a desire for the stability and benefits that were envisioned with centralization. The outport began with a local impetus that was both industrious and largely evangelical Protestant, having been reinforced by the annual visits of Methodist missionaries from Burin. The enterprising venture was fortunate to coincide with such exogenous impulses as a growing colonial Church of England, the Newfoundland School Society, and expanding government services to

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the outports as a result of representative government in 1832. However, within twenty years of its founding, it encountered the swells of Bishop Feild’s Tractarianism, which severely strained the community. Through his acolyte William Kepple White, the bishop was able to gain prominence by taking control of the church and by obtruding in the distribution of government services, helped by the withdrawal of the nss. The original evangelical vision for the church itself was shattered, and all that remained was the interior spirituality of individuals in the settlement nurtured by Bible and Prayer Book, aided by evangelical tracts and magazines, and a diffusive Methodism. Other outports, such as Sound Island, were more out of reach of Feild’s clergyman and chose to continue their evangelical Protestantism in the form of Methodism rather than bow to the hieratic Anglicanism that had entered the bay. It was not for fish that the settlers came to Harbour Buffett in 1836, but rather to make progress in two areas they valued highly: religion and education. W.F. Meek, writing in 1859 and reflecting on the fact that the community was not thirty years old, stated, “The formation is owing chiefly to the late Archdeacon Wix who, when travelling on foot through the country during the winter, visited the isolated families about the shores of the bay, and persuaded them to select some commodious harbour where a number of families might be located, and there to build a church and a school.”1 According to John Haddon, a teacher with the evangelical nss, the settlers formed a “Harbour Beaufette Society” under the leadership of Thomas Edwards Collett to bring these aims into reality. Alexander Chambers, a local merchant, and James Butler also helped as the people joined in freedom, independence, and a democratic spirit to further their goals in their new community.2 The first act of the “Harbour Beaufette Society” in 1836 was “to clear and fence a choice piece of land, to be set apart for sacred purposes, their next was to erect a house for a schoolroom and place for holding divine service.”3 The Board of Education in Placentia reported in 1836 that they had received a communication from Collett which said that the inhabitants held a meeting to build a school.4 This took “more than common exertions and some self-denial” by the new settlers, since they were few and were in the midst of building their own houses, wharves, and stages, clearing land, and digging gardens.5 Victor Butler, a local historian whose grandfather was an original settler, gave a detailed account of the task these first settlers had in order to build homes for themselves with hand saws, augurs, and axes.6 But, notwithstanding their arduous labours, they went into the woods and cut a frame, hauled it out, chopped, and sawed, and built a combined school and church structure, which had twenty-seven students in 1839.7

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A year later William Jeynes, the first missionary sent by Bishop Spencer, arrived and called a meeting to build a church on the land that the people had already set aside for the purpose. They formed a committee and agreed to go into the woods to procure timber for a frame within the month. Subscriptions, locally and from as far away as St John’s, amounted to £78.8 Chambers went to St John’s and collected money from John Sinclair, C.F. Bennett & Co., Rennie, John, James, and James William Stewart, and Baine Johnston & Co.9 Thus, the leaders – Collett, Butler, and Chambers – furthered the cause of education and religion in Harbour Buffett in 1836, making contacts with the Board of Education in Placentia and with merchants and friends in St John’s. It is strange that William Thomas, their treasurer, is not mentioned by White, Feild’s first clergyman in Harbour Buffett. Collett had connections in St John’s, and he probably knew Thomas, an evangelical Anglican who had donated £200 to Spencer’s cathedral. Perhaps White omitted Thomas’s name because he later left the cathedral and attended St Thomas’s, protesting Bishop Feild’s Tractarian innovations.10 It was natural that the St John’s firms who had agents in inner Placentia Bay, or who were suppliers, should be called on to contribute to the building of churches in the area. When Bishop Spencer arrived in Harbour Buffett in 1843, he found the church, which could hold 200 people, and the parsonage “well planned.” The residents were “apparently very devout, consistent and attached to their minister.” He consecrated the church and cemetery and confirmed 69 people. He was amazed at the rapid growth of the place: “I scrambled to the highest hill within reach to get a correct knowledge of the localities of the settlement in which eight years ago there were not a single inhabitant. The present population is upward of 230.” Grateful for financial assistance, books, and missionary, many accompanied him to his boat on departure. Afterwards nineteen individuals signed a memorial thanking Bishop Spencer for his visit and for the rite of confirmation, giving them the opportunity to ratify the vows of their baptism. More would have signed it, but they were on distant fishing grounds, probably at Cape St Mary’s. Much progress had been made since Jeynes had found them “old and young … with much apparent earnestness reading or learning to recall the word of God.”11 The Protestants of Harbour Buffett in 1843 were enjoying unity and peace. Five of the inhabitants continued membership in the Methodist Society until at least 1844, yet it appears they saw no conflict with that and being members of the Church of England.12 Two men who were members of the Methodist Society, Thomas Bendle and Thomas Hann, signed the memorial thanking Bishop Spencer for the spiritual benefits he brought to Harbour Buffett. In 1842 Collett was also a member of the Methodist So-

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ciety, and his is the first name on the memorial. Yet there is no record of any question being raised whether the church would be Church of England or “common to Missionaries,” as was the case at Oderin where “Wesleyans had paid some times two visits a year.”13 Instead, they saw the Methodist support as an encouragement in their evangelical Anglicanism. That Anglicanism was reflected in their religious material culture. The only furniture that was sent from St John’s to the church in Harbour Buffett was a pulpit, the pronounced symbol of Protestantism with its accent on preaching the Word of God. Later, Bishop Feild reflected back on the time of Bishop Spencer: “Bishop Spencer had not been able to extend his visits farther to the north than Twillingate, in Notre Dame Bay … or than Harbour Buffett, in Placentia Bay … In these visits he consecrated nine or ten new churches, but several of them in an unfinished and unfurnished state; a circumstance which need not be regretted, as the preference for pews, and galleries, and pulpits in the center of the building, was then very strong.”14 Many people of Harbour Buffett in 1843 were “apparently very devout,” as Bishop Spencer said. His visit in the middle of July was at the height of the capelin scull. J.G. Mountain has described that time of the fishery well: “At this season the poor fellows are literally at work day and night. They do not come in till dark, the task of splitting and salting the fish then occupies several hours, and before dawn they are off again to the fishing ground. I have known men not take off their clothes for a week together, or get more than a snatch of an hour’s broke sleep with their clothes and boots on for the whole time.” Yet after a day that may have started at 2 a.m. to be followed by another, the people still attended the church at 9 p.m., after they had salted away the last fish and washed up for the occasion, for this was a kind of culmination, a celebration, and they did not want to miss it. They had begun to construct their church building in the fall of 1840. Jeynes had already held classes for confirmation, for which there were “a goodly number.” In 1842 the church was “sufficiently forward to be used,” and a colleague of Jeynes judged that the future looked quite good for the mission. Then, in 1843 with much anticipation, the bishop came. Sunday morning, 16 July, was the high point of the three days. As Spencer recorded in his journal, “A lovely summer morning brought the whole Protestant population with the exception of few persons in the distant fisheries to the Church.” Bishop Spencer preached, confirmed another twenty-three people, and celebrated the Lord’s Supper with “25 very serious and devout members.”15 The following year was eventful too, for while Bishop Feild came to Newfoundland, John Haddon came to Harbour Buffett as a teacher for the New-

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foundland School Society. Haddon had been educated at the “principal school” of the nss in St John’s and had recently been a teacher for the society at Rock Harbour, near Burin. Bishop Spencer had visited Haddon’s school of forty pupils and was impressed with the “exemplary young man,” mentioning that Haddon also read prayers every Sunday in the settlement. He taught in Harbour Buffett for five years and for two of them, between the ministries of Jeynes and White (1845–47), was “left in charge of the church.”16 White said that when he came, he found Haddon “in possession of the parsonage and Glebe.” This meant that Haddon had enormous influence in Harbour Buffett, since as a teacher he was present in the community more than a clergyman, who would have been there in the winter, but away visiting other communities in the mission from May to November.17 He not only “read prayers” but quite conscientiously taught Sunday school to sixty children. He instructed them from an evangelical perspective and gave a revealing account of both the frame of mind of the students and his own perspective in teaching religion: They had been taught what they knew by the exercise of the memory without the judgement, which system of education was productive of much evil. They would say their prayers with very little reverence, and no meaning whatever, having a superstitious notion of merit being attached to a form of words called a prayer … As to religious truths, he believes they had given them up as incomprehensible, for he never could get a sensible answer to a question on that subject; and when he attempted to explain any portion of Scripture, instead of trying to understand him, they would sink into a kind of apathy and answer yes or no with seeming indifference. At the Sunday-school, your teacher … has examined them all separately and carefully to find out the extent of their Christian knowledge; he has ascertained that in all, their knowledge of religion was confused, and of scripture history that it was unconnected; not one could tell me how a sinner may become just before God … It is now four years since he arrived here … In the Sundayschool, out of 60 that attend 53 can read in the Testament well, and tell the benefits of Christ’s death.18 Haddon was not interested in mere rote learning, but rather wanted the exercise of “the judgement.” This emphasis, combined with his focus on scripture, showed a noticeable lack of stress on liturgy and ritual. Instead, his religious teaching had an evangelical focus – “how a sinner may become just before God” and “the benefits of Christ’s death.” He not only stressed at school the necessity of conversion, but also was eager to hear from par-

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ents whether the children exhibited any evidences of being “in a state of grace.”19 Thus, Haddon had total freedom to reinforce an evangelical understanding of Christianity at Harbour Buffett, in school, at home, and weekly at church for two full years. This he did with much zeal and ability. He was a major factor in strengthening the Protestant evangelicalism, which Feild’s clergyman met head on upon his arrival in Harbour Buffett. It can be asked whether Haddon was a Methodist in Church of England clothing. We know that his father, William Haddon, who came to Newfoundland as “Clerk of Works” to supervise the building of Government House, led the Methodist choir in St John’s at this time.20 While in Rock Harbour, Haddon had contributed to the Methodist Society and continued to do so while in Harbour Buffett. In Bonavista, where he moved in 1849, he was called a Dissenter by a contemporary. He surrendered his Church of England lay-reader licence there when the local clergyman, Augustus Bayly, faulted him for attending a Methodist evening service.21 Speaking of his brother William in 1854, who had moved to the Congregational Chapel in St John’s, Haddon said, “What a shame for him to forsake the old Methodist Chapel where he was Christianized.” Haddon became a teacher at the Wesleyan Training School at St John’s in 1855, but later taught at the Church of England Academy.22 Both Bishop Feild and H.W. Hoyles protested against his being appointed inspector of schools in 1861 because he was a Wesleyan.23 Haddon, open to evangelical Anglicanism, may have been driven back to Methodism because of White’s attitude toward Dissenters arising from his Tractarian views on “the Church.” Perhaps, like “Omega,” who wrote to the Public Ledger from Harbour Buffett in 1851 after Bishop Feild’s visit, Haddon saw himself as one of those whose “duty” it was “to abandon the church in this place and seek … that section of the universal church of Christ … whose doctrine is pure, and whose ministers, though they may not boast of apostolic succession may eminently possess the apostolic spirit.”24 When Haddon came to Harbour Buffett in 1844, there were evangelical forces already present in the community. Collett was against “the novel introduction of symbols and forms indicative of doctrines not Evangelical.” He began teaching in the first school in the community on 1 August 1837 and continued until at least Jeynes’s arrival in 1840. While he was teaching, Collett also read “the morning and evening prayers … according to the Liturgy of the Church of England” and taught Sunday school also, free of charge. His branch of the Church of England held to “the pure unadulterated Gospel, as Evangelical Churchmen view it.”25 Thomas Edwards Collett was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1800 and came to Newfoundland in 1815 to serve a seven-year apprentice-

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ship with James Simms as a “notary public general, ship broker, and commercial agent.” Simms was a trained lawyer and merchant who came to Newfoundland in 1809 and set up businesses in St John’s, Twillingate, and elsewhere. He later became the attorney general and acting chief justice. Collett was assigned to Simms’s business in Petty Harbour, where he lived until at least 1831, signing a petition to the spg requesting a clergyman for Petty Harbour in 1824 and subscribing to the nss from 1828 to 1831, and according to the “Family Register” moved to Collett’s Cove, named after him, in 1832 or 1833 and to Harbour Buffett in 1836. He seems to have prospered in Placentia Bay, being able to afford hired men, cows, and a horse. His father in 1845 was glad to hear that he and his large family were “so well and happy.” Collett’s experience was a contrast to life in England, where it was difficult for even “the most industrious man” to make a living because of “taxes and large payments.”26 In Harbour Buffett, in addition to being involved in the church and the school, he held several government appointments, such as justice of the peace, road commissioner, and way master, and carried mails and freight.27 Between 1835 and 1839, the Bendles – Thomas, originally of Hampshire, England, and Bridget – arrived from Haystack. They had previously lived on the Burin Peninsula, where they were visited by the Methodist missionary John Lewis.28 It was the Bendles and Bugdens of Haystack of whom William Wilson, the Methodist missionary, wrote in 1829 that “four individuals have been brought under a concern for their souls and are formed into a society.”29 The Bendles were pillars of the evangelical Methodist Society and the records, which continue up to 1844, place them at the beginning of the list. While Thomas Bendle signed the memorial to Bishop Spencer in 1842, in the previous year he hosted meetings in his house for the Methodist missionary when he visited Harbour Buffett.30 Another major force for evangelicalism in Harbour Buffett was the first missionary, William Jeynes. He visited in 1840, but he did not set up residence there until the summer of 1841. Jeynes had been a teacher with the nss since 1825 and on the occasion of his appointment to Harbour Buffett had been its superintendent. He was still in that capacity in the winter of 1841. He was one of two adopted by the spg as “exclusively missionaries” through Bishop Spencer’s initiative, and thus did not teach day school in Harbour Buffett.31 As a result, Harbour Buffett did not have a school teacher for two and a half years before Haddon’s arrival in 1844. It is not clear when Collett finished teaching, but in 1841 the nss reported that it had taken charge of the school in Harbour Buffett that the residents had built and given to the society. The same report stressed the evangelical “grand object” of the society, which was “the education of the youth of New-

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foundland in the principles of God’s revealed truth, as received and taught by the Church of England.”32 There is some question about Jeynes’s departure in 1845. Haddon simply stated that he “went away.” He had been in Newfoundland since 1824 and returned to England with Feild on the Hawk in September 1846.33 He was possibly tired from missionary work. Feild said he was “nearly worn out” and gave him three months’ leave “to go home during the winter to recover his own strength and to settle his son – and to see friends for whom his heart groans after many years.” White said that he left because of “opposition” from Collett.34 It is possible that Jeynes was fed up with Feild and Tractarianism, for he did not return, and Feild was “indignant and vexed beyond measure.”35 Jeynes was between a rock and a hard place. In 1845 he had came under pressure from Bishop Feild to change his evangelical emphasis. For instance, the Order and Uniformity charge to the clergy of 1844 gave specific instruction to move the pulpit from its central position at the front of the church. Did Jeynes attempt to do so? He was caught between the people and the bishop, and as a former nss teacher he had his own conscience to contend with. Set free by the Hawk, he may have decided that if any “work of noble note, may yet be done,”36 it would be done at home.

fighting tractarianism in harbour buffet t Bishop Feild seriously considered his first appointment for Harbour Buffett in 1847, since the evangelical John Haddon had been in charge of the church for two years with much support from the community. The person he chose was William Kepple White, who recently arrived from England. In his application for mission work, White made no reference to the evangelical Protestant desire to preach the gospel. He said, rather, that he wanted to “engage in Holy work, and to endeavour to promote the glory of God.” Family circumstances had prevented him before, but now at age twentyfive, he wanted to leave the Leeds Post Office and go abroad out of “an ardent love for the church.”37 Pusey himself funded the materials and construction of Gothic St Saviour’s Church at Leeds and preached several sermons there at its consecration in 1845, and this may have strengthened White’s resolve.38 Having heard of Tractarianism in the colonies, he would have been attracted to a colonial bishop like Feild. He became a student at Bishop Feild’s Theological Institution for the summer of 1847, was admitted to the order of deacon, and then was sent to Harbour Buffett.39 He wanted to be ordained priest, writing the bishop that he could not carry out his spiritual duties without “so important a means of grace.” People were going to St John’s

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to receive the Holy Sacrament because he, not being ordained priest, could not give it.40 White was the bishop’s man of the hour, and possibly no one more unsuitable for the people of Harbour Buffett. For White, 1849 became a critical year. In 1846 the spg designated that year to reduce missionary salaries in Newfoundland to £100 so that more clergy could be employed. Local congregations had to make up the difference if clergy were to be paid more. In the 1848 report, the Church Society committee admitted that the collections were “onerous and distasteful,” but it had “no sympathy with objections.”41 This sequence of events having a direct effect on his personal income, White had an added incentive as he made his collections in the fall of 1849. In addition, he had the solemn charge of his bishop to collect “to the utmost.” Bishop Feild had ordered in 1845 that the contributions could not be paid to the minister directly, but had to be collected by the minister and paid to the Church Society, which would then pay the minister. Anyone who was not poor who did not pay to the Church Society would no longer be recognized as a member of the Church of England, and therefore not entitled to clergy services, such as baptism.42 Neither was 1849 an optimal time to collect for the Church Society, for the late 1840s were hard times. Fishermen and their families would have great difficulty meeting the new requirement of the Church Society of a “regular and systematic” collection from each member of the Church of England. Letters of distress over destitution had been sent to the papers from all over Newfoundland in 1847, and not the least, Placentia Bay. A letter from Oderin stated that people were “in a state threatening actual death from famine.”43 Most families were “deeply in debt” as early as 1847 and had neither of the two staples of life, because of the scarcity of fish and potato disease. Men worked on the roads in return for government relief in the form of Indian meal and molasses throughout 1848 and 1849. For instance in December 1847, Secretary Crowdy wrote to the commissioners of relief of Harbour Buffett that thirty-five barrels of Indian meal and one puncheon of molasses were sent with strict instructions to keep half the supply for distribution in the middle of March. The big concern was the threat of starvation. Since the quantity that had been sent was not enough for “the relief of the destitute Poor of Harbour Buffett,” another forty barrels were sent to the commissioners on 20 January 1848.44 It was in this context of near starvation that Feild in 1849 told his clergy to “pursue and promote to the utmost” the collection from every member for the church, many of whom had heard of the £14,000 being lavishly spent on the cathedral in St John’s. In addition, the press had associated Bishop Feild increasingly with the “Puseyism” they were reporting from England, and it was easily interpret-

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ed that to give support to the Church Society was to lend support to the Tractarianism of Bishop Feild, who administered the fund. For instance, when the Times reported that Bishop Feild had been attacked in an English newspaper by a clergyman from his own diocese, Henry Winton reprinted the item in the Public Ledger so that its readers – not just in St John’s, but also “scattered throughout the outports” – could be informed. He suggested that the reason for the attack was Feild’s “leaning” towards Pusey and the Tractarians.45 Just four days before, it was reported in the Patriot that Pusey said he “knew thousands and thousands” of Anglicans who practised auricular confession. Later in the same year it was disclosed that John Roberts, the Church of England clergyman at Bay de Verde, had published a pamphlet in which he pitted the “evangelical party” against Bridge, who, Roberts said, “keeps his Crucifix” in a building that belonged to the nss. Parsons called the pamphlet “a mixture of scandal, fanaticism, nonsense and irreligion,” but it would have further alarmed evangelical Anglicans. Winton reprinted another article in April 1849 reporting that Henry Phillpotts, bishop of Exeter, refused to license James Shore to minister because he did not believe in baptismal regeneration. Shore continued to preach the gospel without a licence and was imprisoned in Exeter.46 Yet another sequence of events culminated in 1849. After a series of communications, Bishop Feild severed his relationship with the nss, resigning as vice-president in 1848. White did not have it quite right when he said it was the nss that had ceased its connection with the bishop. Feild became disgruntled with the nss when he found that he had no authority over licences to hire and fire teachers, so he cut himself from it and declared that the society was “not the organ of the Established Church of England at all.”47 His position was in stark contrast to that of his predecessor, who praised the society for rescuing the Church of England with its shortage of clergy in Newfoundland. It was nss teachers who “held together the congregations of the Church of England, by acting gratuitously as readers of the Divine Service on every Sabbath, and by instructing them in their religious and moral duties under the sanction of ecclesiastical authority.”48 To do its work, the nss received not only donations from subscribers, but also a portion of the government Protestant education grant for the Church of England. Feild wanted that grant. He promoted a petition offensive in the House of Assembly in 1850 when the Education Act was about to expire to acquire a separate Church of England education grant for schools to be “placed under the direction of the Clergy and other members of that Church only.”49 All the petitions and protestations were to no avail. Henry Winton reported on 23 May 1851 that on that day the Assembly voted to continue with two education boards, Protestant and Roman Catholic. It

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was “all that can be done.”50 Seeing that he could do little to control it from within, Feild withdrew from the nss and attempted to marginalize it, declaring that donations to it did not constitute payments to the Church of England required for membership. Yet severing his connection did not solve his problems with the nss. Before he became vice-president, Feild complained of being “at sixes and sevens” regarding it, since in his view it was “neither Church nor Dissent” but stood “in the way of the Church.” Three years after he resigned, he unburdened to Hawkins that the division was the “cause of endless difficulties and perplexities … I cannot describe the difficulties which I am placed in by the separation of the School Society from us.”51 He saw it as an unwanted uncle living in his house, consuming his bread, and giving misguided advice to his children. The first record of friction between White and the people came in 1849 when White went around the harbour to collect subscriptions to the ncs. White refused the offer of six shillings from Collett’s son Richard, and sonin-law Samuel Masters, and demanded instead ten shillings or a quintal of fish. Collett objected to White’s assumption that he had authority to refuse the money from the two men. He brought the matter of the subscription to St John’s to Bridge, the secretary of the Church Society, who also refused to accept it. Matters were brought to a head when children were born to Richard and Samuel on 29 September and 6 October.52 The children needed baptism and the mothers needed to be churched.53 White urged the young men to pay up, instead of being a bad example to the rest of the harbour, and to consider “the sin under which you lie, by opposing Christ’s ministers.”54 Collett replied on behalf of Richard and Samuel that they had already paid to the nss and to the church locally for pew rent, and the six shillings to the Church Society was all they could afford.55 He went on to say that if White was using their parents’ inability to pay as a reason to refuse his grandchildren baptism, he should say so directly, “to enable me to lay before the public, as it is my intention, a full and true description of the trickery, coaxing, bribery, intimidation, and last of all, rod and terrors” that were used against the people to force them to pay.56 White identified Feild’s withdrawal from the nss as the central cause of Collett’s resistance to contribute to the Church Society. Collett had stated that six shillings to the Church Society was all that his son could afford, since he was already paying six shillings locally to the church for pew rent, and six shillings to the nss.57 With Bishop Feild’s Tractarianism in conflict with the evangelical emphasis of the nss, the precise reason for his resignation, Collett would have had a prior allegiance to the nss. It seems that Collett was “too Protestant” to pay the collection for the Church Society. A question remains whether Richard Collett and Samuel Masters, his son and

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son-in-law, were “too poor” to pay the newly required sum. Was their not paying based on conscience or lack of ability? For the people of Harbour Buffett, the forced collection for the Church Society, and the disregarding of the nss, was their first experience of having an outside authority attempt to intrude into their lives. Having enjoyed the freedom and independence of living on the frontier, they had taken initiative to enlist the help of agencies in both Newfoundland and England, but they had never had to face an institution attempting to dictate to them how they would carry on their lives, in this instance, how they expressed their spirituality. They clearly saw these actions of the bishop and his local minister as attempts to limit their inherent right to “spiritual and mental and social freedom,” and framed it in their minds in these terms. Their response was to oppose this new impulse of subjection emanating from the colonial bishop, Edward Feild.58 The first extant letter by Collett on the controversy reveals his theology and values as an evangelical Christian. If neither White nor other clergy in “the Church of my forefathers” would baptize his grandchildren, he would seek a minister “out of her pale.” Such a recourse had been quite common for over twenty years, since Methodist clergy from Burin had been going into Placentia Bay each fall preaching, baptizing, and marrying. It was natural, for example, when ten years later Samuel Masters ran into difficulties with White, to turn to John S. Peach, the Wesleyan minister, to baptize two of his children.59 This did not mean that they had turned Methodist.60 Collett wrote that he would “await the arrival of some more Christian-like Bishop to the land” to give them confirmation, “the principal Baptism of all.”61 He thus revealed that he was far from the “sacramentalism” of White. For evangelical Anglicans like Collett and others in Harbour Buffett, as they implied in their memorial to Bishop Spencer, the main spiritual event was not baptism but confirmation, since it was at the latter that an individual had the opportunity to be converted through a personal commitment to Jesus Christ and his gospel.62 Not aware of the lengthy tenure of most Tractarian colonial bishops, he did not realize that he would have to wait a long time for a more Spencer-like bishop. After the rumour in 1851 of Bishop Feild moving to Nova Scotia proved incorrect, Collett got on with laying his pamphlet “before the public.”63 Collett also said that if necessary, he would baptize the children himself. As a Tractarian, White was so shocked by this belief that he wrote two exclamation marks after quoting it in a letter. He called it an indecent “pseudo-rite” that was scandalous and insane.64 In his view “baptismal regeneration” occurred only at the hands of the clergy of the Church of England, and, according to his belief in apostolic succession, only they had

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received the authority to confer it through “the laying on of hands.” But White was at odds with “The Ministration of Private Baptism of Children in Houses” outlined in the Book of Common Prayer itself, which not only allowed such baptism, but commanded it when it was necessary.65 Residents of Placentia Bay and the south coast of Newfoundland, where Anglican clergy were seldom seen, resorted quite often to that section of the Prayer Book for the baptism of their children “in houses.” William Jeynes noted that none of the three children he baptized on Sound Island had already been “privately baptized,” implying it was a common practice. When the spg missionary James Robertson visited the south coast in 1830, he found that the people of Furby’s Cove in Hermitage Bay knew their catechism and were fond of the church, but they regarded that rebaptism by the clergyman was “a superfluous operation.”66 Similarly, the Tractarian Jacob George Mountain at Harbor Breton said that even up to the last year of his ministry he met people who believed that anyone who had education enough to read was qualified to perform lay baptism. When he “remonstrated against their unlawful practice,” they would reply, “Why, Sir, the man was a fine scholar, he read the service as well as any parson!”67 To them as Anglicans, reading the service from the Prayer Book was the substantial part; who actually read the service was quite secondary. There was another child whom White refused to baptize – that of George Ingram, that is, unless he paid ten shillings or a quintal of fish. Ingram was destitute and had to work on the roads to qualify for Indian meal to support himself and his family.68 John Haddon said he interviewed Ingram the next day about the matter, and Ingram, “a very poor man,” told him that White would not baptize his child unless he would sign his name to pay a quintal of fish. White used the refusal of baptism to make a statement to the people. Haddon commented that in this way the congregation of Harbour Buffett was made “fully to understand” that in order for them to receive the services of the clergyman, they had to pay up.69 White, meanwhile, made no reply to Collett’s letter, so Collett wrote to the bishop on 26 December 1849 appealing the matter, stating that he had been a subscriber to the Church Society at one pound per year. He had attended the last two meetings in St John’s and saw no grounds for White’s actions. Nor did he understand that the bishop had justified White’s requirement of ten shillings by what he had previously stated in his charges to the clergy. Bishop Feild replied on 26 February 1850 that the rites of the church were not to be refused to the poor, but that did not apply to his son. Richard’s earnings might amount to thirty pounds a year. He agreed with White’s refusal and directed Richard to pay the required amount and, appealing to the Bible, directed him to trust God to make up the difference.

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He also appealed to Collett as a man of “influence” at Harbour Buffett to support the church and the clergy.70 On 23 March, Collett went to see White again, this time with his son Richard, asking him to baptize his grandchild, but White curtly referred him to Bishop Feild’s letter. Likely still stinging from this abrupt dismissal, Collett wrote back to Bishop Feild restating his son’s inability to pay and remonstrated that offerings to church should be voluntary. There should be no “toll bar” placed across the church door, since Jesus did not demand payment for children to come to him. He went on to say that if the bishop was going to refuse children baptism unless the parents paid a certain portion of their income, then he should make the same requirement in St John’s with “the children of the rich,” starting with “the Governor at the head and descending through all the other grades of society.”71 Meanwhile, Samuel Masters, about to go to Fortune Bay to fish, promised to pay in the fall and had his child baptized. But he was not impressed with White and had his next two children baptized by John S. Peach, the Wesleyan minister who visited the bay from Burin.72 Richard Collett brought his son to Charles Blackman at St Thomas’s in St John’s to be baptized. Blackman said he regretted having to again oppose his bishop but he would refuse the baptism only if he received “a written order, legally and scripturally supported” from Feild to do so. The order never came, so he baptized the child.73 There was at least one other charge of refusal of church services. Samuel Kirby testified to Collett in 1851 that White had refused to baptize his child in 1849 unless he paid five shillings. “Being too poor” to pay, Kirby said he carried his child to Burin, where it was baptized by Rev. John Cyrus Gathercole, the Church of England missionary there. White called Kirby’s testimony “word for word a mass of falsehoods, as vile as it is possible to utter,” claiming that he had baptized Kirby’s child and that Gathercole had no such entry in his register. Rather, in 1848 at the courthouse in Burin, a child from Harbour Buffett was received into the church, having been already baptized. This was Kirby’s. James Harvey, who was in Burin with the bishop at the time, stated that the parents said they brought the child to Burin because the godparents were there. Two prominent lawyers who were members of the Church Society, Acting Solicitor General H.W. Hoyles and Queen’s Counsel Bryan Robinson, were hired by the society to give a legal opinion on the charges against White. They also determined that Kirby’s testimony was false. Gathercole did not baptize any child of Kirby’s. Instead, his child was “received into the Church” by the clergyman, W.J. Hoyles, who was in Burin at the time with the bishop on his visitation.74 Collett replied that Kirby’s testimony was substantially true. The child was “privately baptized” at Harbour Buffett because of illness, and then

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brought to Burin because White refused completion of the ceremony in the church at Harbour Buffett. The year was 1848, instead of 1849. Kirby got the name of the officiating clergyman wrong, but there were three in Burin at the time, because the bishop was visiting, so it was easy to get them mixed up. “Let Mr White make the most of it,” said Collett. A writer in Collett’s second pamphlet noted that White did not deny he refused “the public christening or reception into the church” of the Kirby child.75 Burin would have been the logical alternative to Harbour Buffett for Kirby. It was the headquarters of the other Church of England mission in Placentia Bay. In addition, Kirby may have had connections with the place. Later, he “was married a second time to a girl from Burin whose name was Mary.”76 While these refusals of baptism took place in an outport in the middle of Placentia Bay, in the transatlantic world of nineteenth-century Newfoundland and Labrador the report of them was suddenly catapulted not just to St John’s, but to London, and throughout the empire. The editor of the London Record mentioned them in an article of 19 August 1850 in which he sounded an alarm over Tractarianism in the colonies. He wrote that parents were refused baptism of their children if they “were too Protestant or too poor to subscribe to the Bishop’s monopolizing Church fund.” He saw the authority of colonial bishops as the key problem. Unlike most bishops back home, the majority of the bishops in the colonies were Tractarian and were “gradually and effectually displacing every truly spiritual and Evangelical principle and influence.” He said he had received recent news that Newfoundland was “fast sinking” into the “medieval absurdities” of Bishop Feild. “The most rigorous priestly and Episcopal discipline” was forced upon the people. Giving hospitality to a Wesleyan had brought threats of excommunication. In addition, the bishop had sanctioned Popish books and tracts while those of the evangelical “Religious Tract Society” were banished. The editorial was a cry of alarm that “the Protestant faith … is so betrayed in Newfoundland.”77 Not only did the refusal of baptisms in Newfoundland receive newspaper press in England, they were immediately highlighted by Daniel Wilson, vicar of St Mary’s Church, Islington, in his Our Protestant Faith in Danger. Wilson claimed that Tractarianism was forced upon Newfoundland to such an extent that parents were left “weeping” for their children as they were refused baptism.78 The Church of England magazine Christian Remembrancer shot back, attacking the character of Collett, painting him as having “a litigious quarrelsome temper.” Feild and White and his other clergy, in contrast to Collett, were an example of self-denial, enduring “the hard laborious life of the soldiers of the Cross” in “a country of seven months’ ice and snow … alone in the waste howling wilderness.”79 Thus instead of ad-

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dressing the matter of refusals of baptism or the prevalence of Tractarianism in the church hierarchy in Newfoundland, the Tractarian organ of communication for the empire proceeded to slander Collett and to praise their representatives out in the colony. Of course great dollops of the rhetoric of empire were used to frame the discourse. While the actions of Feild and White were throwing the young community of Harbour Buffett, not yet fifteen years old, into a baptism of division and discord, both were at St John’s where Feild ordained White priest at the cathedral on 22 September 1850. This was an occasion of much acclaim. The previous day, Saturday, the cathedral nave was consecrated so “that the Bishop’s chair might be set up, and Divine Service decently celebrated with all due and accustomed solemnities.” The event was attended by thirty-six clergy, “all in surplices.” It was a flood tide of sacred ceremony. On Sunday, White was ordained. “The solemn character of the Ordination service was much heightened by the presence of so many Clergy on the platform, and the striking suitableness of the noble Cathedral with all its furniture and ornaments.”80 White, now a priest with the authority to minister Holy Communion, headed back to Harbour Buffett. Not everyone was impressed. On 18 November 1850 the Record printed a letter from a clergyman in Newfoundland who had observed the consecration of the cathedral and presented his Protestant opinion. He mentioned the standard Tractarian trademarks at the event, such as a raised chancel to the east, a raised communion table, candlesticks placed on it, a chanted service, and surplices. He also drew attention to how Bishop Feild was taken up with “rites and ceremonies” in his charge to the clergy that followed and highly touted baptismal regeneration. As an insider, the writer also made public the tenor and debate in the closed meetings of Feild with his clergy. For instance, after Feild extolled baptismal regeneration in his charge and at the meeting, he went on to say that he would “do all in his power” to prevent any of his clergy preaching any doctrines contrary to his. At the Monday breakfast meeting with the clergy, Feild apparently spoke “very strongly” concerning the article in the Record of 19 August about baptism, denying that a child had been refused baptism, and saying that the child had not been presented to the clergyman. Another contention was the significance of signing Bishop Feild’s address to the archbishop to revive convocation for determining matters of doctrine. This debate showed that six years after Feild’s arrival, there was still clerical resistance to Feild. Some of the clergy did not want to sign the address, if signing it meant they would be pledging themselves to doctrines they disagreed with, such as baptismal regeneration. At the Tuesday breakfast meeting there was much “warm discussion” over the address and six of the seventeen or eighteen refused to

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sign it. The writer summed up his evangelical discontent with the whole event by saying that “neither the Saviour nor the way of salvation were mentioned.” For his own support and that of his fellow dissident clergymen, he offered the solace that he had spoken several times to the governor (Le Marchant), who “spoke very warmly against Tractarianism.”81 The first outright charge of Tractarianism in Harbour Buffett, a requirement of “auricular confession,” came as a result of White’s newly ordained capacity as priest. In April 1851 Edith Kirby was dying. Collett charged that she asked for Holy Communion from White, who told her she had to confess her sins to him. She testified to him that she was a sinner and that “she trusted in the atonement of her Redeemer to save her soul.” That was not enough. White, in addition, “required particular confession of her sins.” She did not do so, he refused her Holy Communion, and she died “about ten hours” later. This charge against White became quite an issue in Harbour Buffett because of its Tractarian nature and because several people in the community were involved as a result of attending Edith Kirby during her sickness. Collett said that her husband, Samuel Kirby, and Bridget Bendle called upon him “‘purposely’ to give him the details of what had happened with her clergyman.” White denied the charge, calling it “utterly false.” Hoyles and Robinson determined that “no such confession was required.”82 All parties agreed on one fact – White did not administer Holy Communion to Edith Kirby. Why not? Bishop Feild testified that White wanted to administer Holy Communion. He visited her four times and was “frequent and earnest in his instructions and exhortations, particularly with a view to administering to her the Holy Communion.” White himself stated later, “Most anxiously did I watch for the indications of that repentance, which would justify me in administering to her the Holy Communion – earnestly did I pray for her, and with her.” Still he said he was not satisfied and “was not able to administer to her the Holy Communion.” We have then, from his own testimony and from that of Bishop Feild, that he made considerable effort with this end in view, but did not proceed. He prayed for her and “with her,” which could mean that she prayed also in preparation for receiving the sacrament. So why was it not administered? The charge that White wanted her to make “a particular or auricular confession” of her sins is the most reasonable conclusion. Bishop Feild suggested that White did not give her Holy Communion because he “had reason to fear that she had in some respect denied or concealed her former condition or manner of life.” Bridget Bendle testified that White was not satisfied with Edith Kirby confessing she was a sinner, but wanted her to “call her sins to remembrance and name them, particularly her most besetting sins.” Even White’s own witness stated that she heard White tell Edith Kirby, “You must

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call to mind your sins, and confess them to God.”83 This is not a great distance from what Bishop Feild himself suggested was White’s reason for his refusal to give her Holy Communion, nor from auricular confession. The practice was held dear by Tractarians, and as published by the Patriot in 1847, practised and preached by Pusey at Oxford. Through the Record, news of the perceived transgressions of a Tractarian bishop and his clergyman reached Oxford even before it entered the press in Newfoundland. When it did in 1851, it was the result of a transatlantic debate. H.P. Disney, the Tractarian clergyman at Harbour Grace, in a letter to the Times of St John’s on 21 December 1850, commented on the 18 November letter to the London Record about the consecration of the cathedral. His letter began a concentrated Tractarian-evangelical debate in Newfoundland newspapers that lasted four years. Thus, through newspapers a transatlantic voice was given to a dispute that had become widespread in homes and fishing stages of outport Newfoundland, and among its clergy. After his first summer in Labrador, Disney was stationed temporarily at Harbour Grace to replace the evangelical John Chapman, who had been in Newfoundland for twenty-six years. In its farewell to Chapman the congregation noted that he had taught “the Bible, as the only rule of faith and practice, and this too in an age when strenuous efforts are making to impose upon the people a novel kind of religion, not in accordance with the Protestant principle of our church.”84 Disney, himself, was a representative of this “novel kind of religion.” To him, the 18 November 1850 article in the Record was another of the “usual periodical attacks upon the Bishop and majority of the clergy in Newfoundland,” but this time it was by none other than a local Anglican clergyman. Disney disagreed that the cathedral was costly as the result of its ornateness, such as its porch and candlesticks. He conjectured that the candlesticks were not gold, but brass. He denied that certain books that circulated in the diocese were bought with “the Bishop’s money” and that the bishop “keeps the Saviour and the way of salvation in the background.” Despite being a recent arrival, he boldly denied what he regarded as “the principal scandal” in the letter to the Record, namely, “the refusing of Baptism to a child of parents who had not paid a subscription to the Church Society.” Said Disney, “I venture to say it is a very perverse and dishonest misrepresentation; and that there is not a single Clergyman in the Diocese who would refuse baptism, or any other ministerial office, or religious consolation to a soul within his reach, because his circumstances are poor – much less be guilty of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, by refusing to baptize a child because the parent was unable to pay for the services of a Clergyman. This I am quite certain of – that no

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one would censure such a heartless unfeeling hireling more severely than would the Bishop of Newfoundland.”85 On 21 May 1851 the Times printed a reply to Disney by Thomas E. Collett of Harbour Buffett. The charge of refusal of baptism was far from being a “very perverse and dishonest misrepresentation.” In fact, it had happened in his own family, and he could “with ease forward particulars of some six or eight other cases upon first applications.” He also mentioned that an even more serious refusal had occurred to a dying woman. He said that he was “known of many respectable persons in St John’s,” would be there in a fortnight, and would speak to Disney or anyone else interested in the subject.86 Collett’s letter was published just over a week previous to his visit to St John’s on 31 May, a case of inopportune timing. He went to see Governor Le Marchant over the matter of refusal of baptism for his grandchild and the refusal of Holy Communion to Edith Kirby just before her death. The governor suggested that he see Bishop Feild, which he did, but the bishop “declined entering into the matter.” Feild told Le Marchant that he would hear Collett’s statement “if such be your Excellency’s wish,” yet the governor should know that Collett had already “published the alledged fact in the newspaper.” Feild agreed only to inquire into it “in justice to Mr White.” Collett returned to Harbour Buffett and must have wasted no time, for on 3 June he obtained affidavits from Samuel Kirby, Bridget Bendle, Charles Tulk, and George Ingram affirming that refusals regarding baptism and Holy Communion had taken place. White himself said that in the spring of 1851 the whole “harbor was in a commotion.”87 A couple of months later, on 5 August 1851, Bishop Feild himself arrived at Harbour Buffett on his return voyage along the south coast of Newfoundland. He held a hearing on the evening of 6 August into “the grave charge” of the denial of the sacrament to Mrs Kirby. Feild, White, and the Church Society portrayed it as very significant that “not one” appeared before them to sustain the Kirby charge during the two hours. Actually, Samuel Kirby did show up. Feild said he tried “to examine him,” but “he refused to answer any questions addressed to him.”88 He simply presented “a written paper in the hand-writing of Mr Collett,” and “declared he would not say one word.” The “written paper” appears to have laid out the case against White, since Feild in referring to it said he could “never receive as evidence the written statement of a person who refused to answer any questions. It would be a piece of injustice to the accused.” It is quite possible that Kirby did not speak because he felt that the hearing was hardly “a fair tribunal,” as White called it. It was made up of “the Bishop, his attendants, the Churchwardens and others, with me.” Kirby could see upon entering the room that with these power relations he could

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not get an impartial hearing. He would have been uneasy about how Bishop Feild and his panel would frame their questions, and what interpretation they would put on his answers. In addition to the religious divergence, he would have felt at a disadvantage appearing before such an educated group who could write down anything about the proceeding or about what he said, without him being able to understand it. He was able only to sign his name with an X. Moreover, how would they use this so-called evidence? They told Kirby to remain. He left. Thus he made his protest and left Feild powerless to obtain leverage over him, a shrewd manoeuvre for a fisherman to make when confronted by a colonial bishop. After visiting Spencer’s Cove at the northern end of the island, Feild returned on Sunday, 10 August 1851, and met with the people in the schoolroom, not to listen to their concerns but to lecture them from a prepared manuscript. He told them that not one of the six or eight cases regarding baptism had been brought before him.89 This may have been because he never gave them a specific opportunity to state their case, since the meeting mentioned had reference to Mrs Kirby, not baptisms. Besides, likely some of the fathers of the children were away fishing off Cape St Mary’s, as it was the peak of the fishing season.90 Masters may have gone back to Fortune Bay as he did the previous year. This is the way it was when visiting fishermen and expecting them to be at home in August – like looking for robins in December. When he was at Spencer’s Cove before coming to Harbour Buffett, most of the men were absent, having either gone to St John’s or “in search of bait.” Just afterward, when he visited Ragged Islands, Feild wrote in his diary, “Here, as at Spencer’s Cove, the men were absent.”91 Why did Collett not question Feild in Harbour Buffett? He must have thought that the letter he sent along with Kirby was sufficient. Collett probably had a bad taste in his mouth by this time. As we have seen, he had read the letter of 12 October 1849 in which White stated that he rejected his son’s contribution of six shillings to the Church Society out of obedience to his bishop and “the regulations of the Church Society.” He had asked White if he meant by his letter that he was refusing to baptize his grandchildren. White had not replied. When he wrote to Bishop Feild and informed him about White’s stance, Feild had replied that “Mr White is quite right.” On 23 March 1850, when Collett had gone again to see White, this time with his son Richard, and had asked him to baptize his grandchild, White wrote that he told Collett, he “declined to recognize him.” Moreover, when Collett had called on Bishop Feild in St John’s, the bishop also “declined entering into the matter.” The bishop’s major concern was to provide “justice to Mr White.” Referring to Collett, he told the people of Harbour Buffett that he “declined to receive his statements” because nei-

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ther White nor “all other parties who could give him information on which he could rely” were present. Having been contradicted by letter, Collett had been then rejected in person. He had also broken a cardinal institutional rule, which is to never go public. Feild told the people at the time, “Neither should I be willing at any time to receive statements against a clergyman from any person who first of all addresses his complaints to the public.” Feild must have had a memory lapse on that day. Collett had been knocking on his door for two years. He had told White in 1849 that he was going to appeal to the public with “a full and true description” of what was happening.92 By 6 August 1851 he was long past expecting any justice from Bishop Feild. Feild told the people that it was his duty as bishop to protect them from a clergyman when warranted and to protect a faithful clergyman from the attacks of “unreasonable and wicked men.” Naming Collett as an example of the latter, he said that he had tried to conciliate him, to no avail. He would not “allow him to rule, and direct, contrary to the directions given … by the Church Society” – the age-old manoeuvre of the administrator placing a committee between himself and his accuser. Feild spent considerable time reinforcing the point that the clergyman had Feild’s authority and that of the Church Society to demand annual payments from the people. He quoted scripture to reinforce his claim and shrewdly stated that it was “most plainly an Evangelical precept.” Anyone who did not pay the required amount was understood by the church to have declined the services of the clergyman. Of course, characterized in this way, Bishop Feild did not have to say that the church would refuse to offer the services of the clergy. Thus, full responsibility was placed on the individual who did not pay. Bishop Feild enforced his point by saying that such people had to think about “how they can answer it to Christ and the Church to deprive their little ones” of these benefits.93 The admonition overlooked the fact that it was the church that made the ruling on which services to “their little ones” were conditioned in the first place. It is even more striking that just one year before Feild sat in the school in Harbour Buffett and addressed the people, Ernest Hawkins, the secretary of the spg, had sent him a letter on 22 August 1850, in which Hawkins specifically stated that “a Clergyman, wherever stationed, is bound to administer the Sacraments of the Church without regard to the point whether Church dues have been satisfied or not.”94 Thus both Feild and White were betraying the trust given to them by the spg, which was paying their salaries. The remainder of Feild’s lecture was taken up with the Edith Kirby case. He found no fault with White whatsoever. He told the people that their minister was a wonderful example of “faithfulness, care and affectionate

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concern.” Similarly, he noted in his journal (for publication) that he “investigated a charge of refusal to administer the Holy Sacrament to a dying woman” and concluded after interviewing several witnesses that instead of neglecting his duty, White “had been most kind and unremitting in visiting and instructing her.”95 This was clever. There was little doubt that White warranted his bishop’s praise, for in his pastoral visitation White was a stellar example to all clergy. But why did White not serve Holy Communion to Edith Kirby? This was the question that the bishop refused to address. He did not mention “auricular confession,” but instead spoke to what was not in dispute. Nor did the bishop mention the candles on the communion table, another cause of controversy. Candles in that position without a utilitarian function had considerable emotive significance and they aggravated the people of Harbour Buffett. “Omega” stated in a letter to the Public Ledger that White placed the candles on the communion table about three weeks before the arrival of the bishop in 1851, and it so “displeased the aged and respectable part of the inhabitants … they absented themselves from the church.”96 Not only that, someone entered the church at night, cut the candles in pieces, and “strewed” them all about. This was the very church the people had worked so hard to build just a decade before, and two-thirds or more of the inhabitants deserted it for months.97 It was this issue that the people expected Bishop Feild to address when he called a public meeting in the schoolroom. Bishop Feild made no reference to it or its Tractarian significance at all, and gave those present no opportunity to speak. Instead, he focused on telling the people that they must pay the Church Society, and heaped praise on White, his clergyman. “Omega” concluded that scarcely anyone left the meeting who was not upset with “such glaring sophistry.” He attested that indeed there were refusals of baptisms and of the sacrament in the community and that this would not be tolerated by the people.98 Many of the men were away fishing, and those present were generally law abiding and respectful of the office of bishop, so they left him alone.99 When White refused Collett and his family Holy Communion a year later, one reason he gave was that Collett had not “publicly withdrawn … the candle story.” Collett replied that he would address that issue when White proved that “there were not two new mould candles placed over the communion table, and none at the same time placed in the other usual places of the church as was before customary.” John Hollett also testified that before the bishop’s arrival, new candles were placed on the communion table only. He said he specifically asked White if he was planning night services, and White said he was not, which ruled out any utilitarian function for the candles.

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When writing about “the Candle story,” White used his standard “false and malicious” terminology to describe the protest of the people and stated that all he did was clean up the candle ends and place new candles in the church, since the old ones had been there since 1847. He said he told Collett that “the Lord Bishop had nothing whatever to do with the exchange.” He also made the charge that Collett went “from house to house” and disturbed the congregation “during divine service.” Later, he omitted that charge. What is most noticeable about the Church Society pamphlet account of the event, published from White’s letter, was the addition of over a page in order for “the Candle story … to be more particularly explained.” The readership specifically referenced for this additional explanation was not the people in Harbour Buffett or even in Newfoundland, but “Christian people in England.” Bishop Feild and his Church Society were obviously concerned about a transatlantic sensitivity to the use of candles on the communion table. The pamphlet asserted that the charge was “concocted” by people to serve “their private ends” and by Dissenters who fervently wanted to obstruct the Church of England.100 Thus neither Bishop Feild nor White nor the Church Society nor its secretary, Archdeacon Bridge, acknowledged that members of the Church of England in Harbour Buffett were genuinely offended by this disregard for their spiritual values. Robinson and Hoyles later accused Collett of claiming in his pamphlet, The Church of England in Newfoundland, that Bishop Feild told White to light the candles on the communion table. This charge is nowhere in Collett’s pamphlet. A writer in Collett’s pamphlet later observed that even if the lawyers’ inclusion of the charge was treated “as a blunder, it may be fairly taken as a criterion of the value of this legal opinion.” All Collett claimed was that there were “two new mould candles placed over the communion table, and none at the same time placed in the other usual places of the church.” He said he had not heard of the charge before and would content himself in “reminding the legal gentlemen they have made themselves in this instance witnesses as well as prosecutors, jury, and judges,” which was “as bad a defence … as any two bad lawyers ever did.”101 It is clear that Bishop Feild preferred that candles be placed on the communion table. The bishop was a man of exact ceremonial detail, as can be seen in his various charges to the clergy.102 In his 1849 charge to his clergy in Bermuda, published in St John’s and also distributed to some of his clergy in Newfoundland, he noted that among the ornaments “most common” in churches in England and in some churches in Bermuda were “two lights … set on the Altar.” Speaking of these and other ornaments in some of the churches, he told his clergy, “I heartily wish they were adopted with due honor, in all.”103 Therefore, one cannot agree with White and the Church

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Society that Bishop Feild “probably never noticed them.”104 If Feild looked for anything positive to say in his lecture at the schoolhouse, he knew well not to compliment the people on the communion table candles in their church at Harbour Buffett. Frederick Jones, his biographer, and partly his apologist, attempted to dismiss the resistance of the people of Harbour Buffett by simply referring to it as “the Collett Case.” He then dismissed Collett by saying that he had “a long history of quarrels with the local clergy.” This institutional line is hardly a sufficient analysis. As for William Kepple White, we have seen that the resistance he met at Harbour Buffett went far beyond “the Collett Case” and far beyond “payment to the Church Society.” Collett just happened to be one of the people who resisted who was able to express that resistance in print. Perhaps Jones is unintentionally right in saying that Collett “had little support in Harbour Buffett.”105 What was happening there was not a matter of a people supporting Collett, but of a people opposing a bishop and his clergy who were attempting to dispossess them of their evangelical spirituality and substitute another. There is no reason to think that religion was not the primary motive for the rejection of Bishop Feild in Harbour Buffett in 1851. To refuse to accept it as such is to engage in a phenomenon that Henry Glassie has pointed to: “The academic historian seems tempted to dismiss religious people as marginal … and to probe beneath religious motives for worldlier goals deemed to be more real.” Other, secular reasons may have had an impact, but they are not easily identifiable. What is clear is that in Harbour Buffett in 1851, there was, to use E.P. Thompson’s words, “a vigorous self-activating culture of the people” that was “resistant to any form of external domination.”106 A key tactic of Feild’s long-term strategy in Harbour Buffett was to supplant its evangelical nss school. After he severed his connection with the society, an opportunity arose when John Haddon left in 1849 and another teacher was not immediately found for the nss school. The first indication that White had set up a second Church of England school at Harbour Buffett in competition with the nss is found in the minutes of the district meeting of the Protestant Board of Education, which met at the courthouse in Placentia on 3 July 1850 with White as chairman.107 White wrote in his report that board-assisted schools were “established by their Chairman” at Oderin, Isle Valen, Woody Island, Sound Island, Spencer’s Cove, and Harbour Buffett. In his statement of accounts for the year 1849 he entered ten pounds for himself and over five pounds for books on 4 July.108 Many in Harbour Buffett were unimpressed with this manoeuvre. Ann Maria, a daughter of Thomas Bendle, said the next spring that the school was “greatly altered since Mr Haddon left” and “scarcely one attends it now.” White

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had taken it over and taught the children for two hours a day all winter.109 Although the nss provided another teacher in 1850, Feild was able to acquire funding for a separate school under the direction of White.110 The next notation in the Journal of the House of Assembly for education at Harbour Buffett under the Protestant Board was thirty pounds for James Burton with thirty-seven students in 1852.111 In this way T.F.H. Bridge, chairman of the Protestant Board of Education, was able to obtain for his bishop, defeated in the assembly, a government grant for a school under his direction only, in at least in one outport in Newfoundland. Bishop Feild and the Church of England hierarchy supported this questionable act. Children all over Placentia Bay were in need of schools and the Protestant board had limited funds. White had urged the legislature to provide more money “for the purposes of Education within the Placentia district.” He had already reported that only 111 Protestant children out of 1,200 in Placentia Bay were being educated. He wrote: “It is hoped that the necessity of the appeal for further funds will be attempted by the legislature.”112 Yet, despite the scarcity of funds, a significant proportion of the Education Board’s budget for the district was spent to start a second Church of England school in Harbour Buffett with a Tractarian agenda in competition with the evangelical members of the Church of England who were running the school of the nss. Thus, Feild, Bridge, and White furthered their agenda at the expense of parents and children crying out for education in other parts of the bay. Collett protested that in 1852 White, “without the sanction of the Board at any legal meeting,” appropriated thirty pounds for a rival school with less than half the attendance of the other. Since the nss school could accommodate all the children of the community, the funding of the second school was “a waste of the public funds.” Moreover this waste occurred while “many other places in the district are unprovided for.”113 Similarly, John Haddon wrote as the superintendent of the Protestant Education Board, “In 1851 the Board commenced an opposition school. The injustice done to the Society is to be regretted, and likewise the loss the harbor will sustain, for the Teachers stationed there by the Society were superior to any that the Board have engaged … I am happy to say that I know of no other place where the Board grant has been thus misapplied.”114 White was able to strengthen his hand further because the Church of England was positioned in the 1840s to dispense other expanding government services. In 1843 James Crowdy, the colonial secretary, appointed Thomas E. Collett and James Butler as road commissioners at Harbour Buffett.115 The House of Assembly had allotted £800 pounds for Placentia and St Mary’s Bays for roads and bridges. Of that amount Harbour Buffett was given £25. It was Collett “and others” whose names appeared on peti-

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6.1 Collett’s Church of England in Newfoundland

tions to the Assembly for roads from 1844 to 1846. But Collett’s influence was diminished over time. Road work was subsumed under government relief during the difficult years 1847–49 and Collett was not one of the relief commissioners. They were W. Kepple White, James Butler, and Thomas Hann, after John Haddon left in 1849.116 In return for work on the roads, the relief committee were to dispense Indian meal and molasses. This gave White considerable power and influence. For a fisherman and his family, getting through the winters of 1847 to 1849 was a daunting task, and they would possibly face starvation if they were unable to access government

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meal. But it was to the clergyman that the hungry had to turn in order to receive it. White’s position may have caused the people to hesitate to go against him when in 1849 he started collecting for the Church Society and when his Tractarian theology became more evident. The people did not know how hard this winter would be, or the next. Theology was important, but it was meal that staved off the pang of hunger for oneself and one’s family. White was thus in a position not only to refuse people the spiritual services of baptism and visitation, but also to withhold the physical necessaries of life – not an insignificant power over a people. Perhaps to gain a measure of independence, in 1850 Thomas Collett himself received two barrels of Indian meal for “two poor families” in addition to the eight barrels allotted to White.117 The winter of 1852–53 was another particularly difficult one. Fish and herring were “exceedingly scarce.” Christopher Ayre, the acting colonial secretary, authorized the relief commissioners of Harbour Buffett to expend forty pounds worth of Indian meal in return for work on the roads. He included Thomas Collett in his list of commissioners. The distress must have been acute. The commissioners reported on 7 January that fifteen heads of families qualified for relief. The report was written by White, and signed by White, Butler, and Hann, but Collett’s name was absent. White, the chairperson and main force on the committee, included with the report a letter that only he had signed expressing his dissatisfaction with the procedure of receiving a petition from the poor for dispensing relief. The process was too public. He did not want the amount of food purchased to be public knowledge. Presently, people signed for relief and knew the committee had it. As a result, if the committee refused to distribute it, the relief had the effect of “exciting people who for every reason ought to be kept quiet.” Not only that, said White, but “threats have already been uttered against myself and the store in which the relief is kept.” There was also discord within the committee. White, Hann, and Butler stated they had to withdraw from Thomas Collett’s company because he made “certain unjust charges and very false statements” against them. It is questionable whether they had authority to exclude Thomas Collett as commissioner, but the result was to keep the dispensing of relief within the control of the Tractarian faction in the church. Evangelicals may have wondered whether the commissioners would “exercise discretion” in their favour to feed their families if they spoke out too loudly against the Tractarianism of White. White, himself, was aware of the persuasive power of having barrels of Indian meal in a time of hunger. He later charged that an agent of the nss attempted “to draw away my scholars and people by offers of meal and molasses.”118 Needless to say, the power of such “drawing” was normally in the hands of White himself.

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Thus, Harbour Buffett was indeed in a quite a state of “commotion” in the late 1840s and early 1850s. White introduced changes in the internal arrangement of the church building, in addition to placing candles on the communion table, to make it more conformable to Tractarian worship. He enforced payment of Church Society dues on pain of being refused church sacraments, and was leaning toward the practice of auricular confession. He started a school in competition with that of the nss and was in a powerful position as chairman of the Relief Commission. He had significant support in such people as Butler and Hann, but many were aghast at the threat to their spiritual values. Given such agitation, one wonders how Thomas Collett’s pamphlet, The Church of England in Newfoundland, could have caught Bishop Feild and the Church Society by surprise in 1853.

the pamphlet war: victory and loss The publication of pamphlets, a primary form of nineteenth-century media, was a significant means to voice opposition to Bishop Feild and also to meet that opposition. Thomas Collett discharged a broadside at the hierarchy of the church with particular reference to Harbour Buffett with his Church of England in Newfoundland, and the bishop and archdeacon scrambled to return a response by editing a reply from White and adding a hasty legal opinion of two prominent St John’s lawyers. Then the bishop and his archdeacon each fought back with his own pamphlet defending themselves, the Church Society, and White. Governor K.B. Hamilton joined the fray, defending Thomas Collett with a pamphlet, and lastly Thomas Collett and others discharged another broadside at the hierarchy of the church with the Church of England in Newfoundland, No. 2. These publications were picked up and enlisted by newspapers in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and in England in the wider battle between Tractarians and evangelicals. The Tractarian periodical Colonial Church Chronicle, joined the fights and dispensed its views on the matter throughout the colonies of the empire. On 11 August 1853 White received from a friend a pamphlet that he described as of “a most scandalous nature,” since both his name and that of Bishop Feild were “freely used.”119 The pamphlet was The Church of England in Newfoundland by Thomas E. Collett. The full title was considerably longer. It continued: As Indicated in a Correspondence between Thomas E. Collett, Esq., J.P., and the Lord Bishop of Newfoundland and the Rev. W.K. White, a Missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Beaufet, in Placentia Bay. Also: Some Evidence in Proof of the Statements: with a Few Additional Facts from Various Sources Shewing the Tractarian Tendencies of Some of the Missionaries of the Society under the Countenance of the Ecclesiastical Au-

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thorities. The pamphlet was printed by Joseph Woods of the Courier, a Methodist who identified with evangelicals of all stripes. In 1851 Woods published the Newfoundland Guardian, which he offered as “the rallying point … to orthodox Protestant Christians of all denominations.” Their one point of unity was the Lord Jesus Christ. They differed “only in ceremonial details.” Woods felt that not only evangelical Anglicans, but also Methodists were threatened by Feild’s Tractarianism.120 In the preface Thomas Collett stated that he had “no other object” than to bring before the members of the Church of England “the anti-protestant practices which are allowed to prevail in the Colonial Church in Newfoundland; and also the arbitrary and unchristian refusals of the Sacraments.” The pamphlet consists mainly of correspondence – letters between Collett and Bishop Feild, Collett and White (the local clergyman at Harbour Buffett), and Collett and H.P. Disney, who replaced the evangelical John Chapman at Harbour Grace. It contains letters to the Public Ledger, the Times, and the Newfoundland Guardian. Also included are affidavits of some members of the church at Harbour Buffett, a list of Tractarian changes to churches in Newfoundland, and an article on Tractarianism. The letters and items focus on two issues: whether the Church of England had a right to demand payment for services and whether it had a right to make Tractarian changes to people’s way of worship when they were offended by them. The two were related, since in some instances residents refused to give to the Church Society out of dissatisfaction with the theological and ceremonial changes. The last section of the pamphlet speaks of the “offensive deformities” of Tractarianism outside of Harbour Buffett. Two letters draw attention to the rebaptism of children at Lamaline and Burin who had been previously baptized by Wesleyan ministers. The final item is a cry of alarm over the new Tractarianism of Archdeacon Bridge and the changes at St John’s Church and at St Thomas’s, also in the city. It mentions the names of several clergymen who left Newfoundland because of Bishop Feild’s enforcement of Tractarian doctrines and practices.121 In response to Collett’s pamphlet, on 4 October White wrote to the committee of the ncs, whose officers included Bishop Feild, Thomas Bridge, H.W. Hoyles, Bryan Robinson, and C.F. Bennett. The committee received the letter on 17 October from Bishop Feild. White’s letter was redacted and published as a pamphlet in early December 1853, and it included two additional letters each by White and Collett, and an appendix consisting of two letters to Archdeacon Bridge, two “declarations” of witnesses, and a legal opinion and letter by Bryan Robinson, QC, and H.W. Hoyles, the acting solicitor general.122 White had not immediately responded to Collett’s pamphlet but was prompted to do so when he learned that it was having an

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impact in St John’s.123 Possibly he heard also that Collett’s pamphlet was having an impact in England, for the Record drew attention to Collett’s Church of England in Newfoundland on 5 September 1853, before it had received any press in Newfoundland. The Record had the largest readership of any religious paper printed in Britain. According to White, this was “the first information of its existence that many Churchmen in this Colony received.”124 Thus the pamphlet already had a transatlantic dimension, having been written up in London and sent throughout the empire before it was heard of by the church hierarchy in St John’s. The Record quoted several sections of the pamphlet in the context of requesting the spck and the spg to hold colonial bishops more accountable when complaints were made, since they sent the bishops large amounts of money. The editor, siding with Collett against White and Feild, was alarmed at the refusals of baptism and Holy Communion. He also agreed with Collett’s pamphlet that Bishop Feild did not address the issue of auricular confession at all but simply stated that the missionary was assiduous in giving Edith Kirby pastoral care. The Record referenced Collett’s pamphlet again on 15 September expressing similar dismay.125 White’s tactic in defending himself before the public was to attempt to demonize Collett in particular, and the opposition in general. He charged that Collett committed “every act his malice could invent” to injure him and his family. Yet according to John Haddon, Collett paid men to haul wood for White in 1849, and constantly provided him with milk. Haddon also said, “I never knew him to kill an animal for his own use without sending a portion to the parsonage.”126 White questioned the sworn statements that Collett acquired, saying that he “read what he wrote, or what he did not write,” implying that the witnesses were not aware of the content of the statements. Not only Collett, but all who contributed to the pamphlet, were “slanderers.” This would have included the people of Harbour Buffett who were witnesses, such as George Ingram and Bridget Bendle, of whom Collett said, “I presume, that every Minister who has visited this Bay for the last thirty years, would defend her from imputation.”127 White specifically charged that the affidavit of Samuel Masters was “grossly false” and that Samuel Kirby’s declaration was “word for word a mass of falsehoods, as vile as it is possible to utter.” The correspondence to the Public Ledger by “Omega” was called “that foolish and wicked letter.” White repudiated Collett’s pamphlet in total, saying that “all the worst passions of the human mind have been engaged in this concoction of falsehood and deception.”128 The committee of the Church Society, whose president was Bishop Feild himself, did not publish White’s letter in the original but instead made several changes. Under the committee’s direction, some of White’s denigrating

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language was deleted or changed – for example, the discrediting of Samuel Kirby’s testimony was changed from “a mass of falsehoods, as vile as it is possible to utter” to “a fabrication.” The description of Collett as “possessed of an evil spirit,” which either he or someone at the Church Society crossed out, was omitted in the pamphlet. In counter-measure, the general “direction” of the gentlemen of the committee was a more extensive and intensive condemnation than even White had made in his letter. They particularly faulted Methodists, laying blame for the printing of the “sinister” pamphlet with “its poison” at “a press avowedly the organ of the Dissenters.” Addressing the controversy about the candles being placed on the communion table, they declared that such statements were “usually concocted and propagated by individuals in the Colony, to serve their private ends, and by Dissenters from our Church, who are wonderfully zealous in obstructing her usefulness.” They also cut deeper. The pamphlet added an assertion that not only were the charges against White “absolutely false” but also “I think must be known to be false by those who published them.” This accusation of deliberate falsification included those who signed sworn statements regarding Edith Kirby being denied Holy Communion. White was also made to say that the purpose of the whole “wicked” proceeding was to use him as a means “to assail my Bishop.” And his bishop himself “desires and endeavours to teach the pure and simple Gospel of Christ.”129 No such references were made in the original letter. This is likely the hand of Archdeacon Bridge, who once was very much at home in evangelical circles. It was by Bridge that “nearly all the annual Reports of the Society were framed and in greater part composed; while by a continual correspondence, and various other means, with his prolific pen, he enforced its claims.”130 Two other members of the committee who “directed” White’s letter were Bryan Robinson and H.W. Hoyles. Their legal opinion on the charges in Collett’s pamphlet was appended to White’s. They considered only two of the charges in the pamphlet and negligently one that was not. They did not speak to any of the witnesses involved or take sworn statements. Yet they still delivered the opinion that “the whole of the charges are utterly devoid of truth.” Not only so, “but they must have been published with a knowledge of their falsehood.” The two must have come to a hasty decision. The committee of the Church Society received White’s letter on 17 October, and it immediately directed Robinson and Hoyles “to investigate its allegations.” Three weeks later, on 8 November, they delivered their report. An urgent search was made for Collett’s pamphlet, because the committee did not have access to a copy. Feild said he had read White’s letter, but “without the Pamphlet … the commentary is unintelligible.” Still, not hav-

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ing Collett’s pamphlet did not bother the lawyers. They delivered their opinion without ever seeing it, which perhaps explains why they addressed only two of the charges in the pamphlet, and one that was not in it at all. On 25 November they informed the committee that they had finally seen it, but their opinion had not changed “as to the falseness of the charges in it against the Rev. Mr White.” They reiterated that the charges were published “with a knowledge of their being unfounded,” and added, “with a malicious intention.” Still, it was not expedient to prosecute, for it would likely “create sympathy for the slanderer, by representing him as a martyr for conscience sake.” There also might be people on the jury who were not members of the Church of England.131 William Kepple White’s redacted letter to the Church Society from Harbour Buffett, 4 October 1853, was thus published as a pamphlet with the prosaic title, Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society in Conformity with a Resolution Passed the 17th October, 1853. In this way Bishop Feild, his Archdeacon Bridge, Solicitor General Hugh Hoyles, Queen’s Counsel Bryan Robinson, and a committee of prominent St John’s merchants and lawyers assented to and abetted the clergyman’s public condemnation of Thomas Collett, Samuel Masters, Bridget Bendle, Samuel Kirby, Charles Tulk, and George Ingram, who, except for Collett and Masters, could sign their name only with an X. A group of outport settlers had protested against a bishop’s clergyman who, they believed, was disrespecting their spiritual values, so the church hierarchy demonized them all. But the people did speak up, and though the bishop and all the bishop’s men maligned their character, they were not able to take away their voice. In the process the reverend clergy, supported by the scaffolding of class, laid bare their morality, whatever the claims they were making about the virtues of Tractarianism and its ethos. Henry Winton of the Public Ledger mentioned in his editorial of 6 December 1853 that he had received White’s Church Society pamphlet purporting to refute a previous pamphlet, which he gathered was published anonymously under the title, Indications of the Church of England in Newfoundland.132 Winton had nothing to say about either pamphlet except for White’s charge that Collett’s pamphlet was printed in St John’s at a press “avowedly the organ of Dissenters.” Winton, a Congregationalist, replied that there was no such Dissenting press in St John’s, and that Dissenters had no such “unworthy and sinister design.” Instead they stood for “the promotion … of any Christian Church founded upon the pure and unadulterated Scriptures of Truth.”133 John Haddon, who had moved to Bonavista from Harbour Buffett, replied to Winton, thanking him for the “smart rap” he gave White for what he said about Dissenters. But Winton had not dealt

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with Collett’s pamphlet in his “usual impartial way,” For example, the pamphlet was not anonymous but had “very respectable signatures,” and as Collett’s “friend and son-in-law” he could testify to the “strict integrity” of his character. He had witnessed the refusal of George Ingram’s child for baptism and had “direct evidences” of other refusals. After White’s ordination, Collett and his family were refused the sacrament. They were now “literally excommunicate in the very settlement which they founded, in the very church which they so devotedly assisted to build.” He included excerpts of testimonies against White’s character from individuals in Placentia Bay, which Winton declined to publish. Haddon said that they showed “the sort of man the poor folks of Harbour Beaufette are pestered with.”134 On 10 December, Joseph Woods of the Courier wrote an extensive editorial about White’s pamphlet. He noted that it was authorized and published “under the direction” of the committee of the ncs and that it claimed to speak for “the collective Church Authorities of the Diocese.” They must therefore take full responsibility for its content. He agreed with Winton’s remarks about “the uncalled-for calumnies” against Dissenters. He added that “the true Protestant portion of the Church of England in this place” rejected the reproach that the Church Society cast their way. He was also careful to point out that strictly speaking there were no Dissenters in Newfoundland, since the Church of England was not an “established religion” in the colony. He then spoke to the “sage legal opinion” of Hoyles and Robinson, reminding his readers of their high offices. In lending their names and offices to the slander in the pamphlet, they had compromised “their professional capacity.” They had become “the tools of, and truckling to, a power which” was “as much opposed to freedom of thought and liberty of speech, as ever shed its baneful influence over a country.”135 While being discredited locally, Bishop Feild and the Church Society received much positive transatlantic press from the Hoyles and Robinson opinion. On 23 December the Morning Chronicle in England copied it and reported that “two legal gentlemen of great respectability” carried out a “formal” investigation and found the charges against White, which the editor called “malicious calumnies,” to be totally false. It reported one of the charges as simply that “White had refused to baptize a child until his father should contribute a certain sum to the Church Society.”136 The article was reprinted in the English Standard and the Newfoundland Patriot.137 Yet, to “require” or “demand” payment to the Church Society in order to receive baptism and other services from the clergy was the precisely articulated regulation of Bishop Feild.138 The Colonial Church Chronicle, the Church of England bishops’ journal, also printed the article with the comments that the charges were made by “an unscrupulous assailant,” and that the Hoyles

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and Robinson report gave “complete vindication” to the clergyman, William Kepple White.139 Through this episcopal magazine the apparent vindication of White and the slandering of Collett and other individuals were given wide circulation throughout the empire. Although neither Feild nor Bridge nor any member of the committee of the Church Society had seen a copy of Collett’s pamphlet as late as October, the evangelical Governor K.B. Hamilton received a copy in July or August. His positive response to it did not become known until Archdeacon Bridge came to his door collecting for the Church Society on 4 November, as we read in the archdeacon’s contribution to the controversy, A Statement of Some Recent Proceedings of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society in a Letter to the Lord Bishop of the Diocese. The governor had accepted the position of patron of the Society upon his arrival the previous January, and some time after pledged to give sixty pounds annually. Even so, he wrote to Bridge on 4 November that he was giving to the Church of England outside the avenue of the ncs “for reasons which conscientiously constrain me.” He enclosed thirty-five pounds. Bridge returned the money, reminding the governor rather heavy-handedly that at one time he had praised the society and promised his full support. Bridge inquired why the governor had withdrawn it and also stated that his intention to show the committee the correspondence between himself and the governor. Hamilton replied that he had withdrawn his financial support in response to the revelations in Collett’s pamphlet, which disclosed that the society sanctioned actions “which are not in harmony with the Church of England.”140 When he had presided over the society as patron he had reminded them that it was the responsibility of the clergy to “preach the Gospel,” which he explained as “those evangelistic truths which alone are effectual to diffuse regenerating life.”141 Bridge asked for an interview with the governor before meeting with the Church Society Committee. He could show the governor, he said, that the charges in the Collett pamphlet were both “vile and malignant,” and told the governor that he presumed he would be glad to have his “false impressions” removed. Hamilton agreed to meet Bridge, and the interview was pivotal. Bridge attempted to disabuse the governor of his false notions by reading the Hoyles and Robinson report to him, by detailing the bishop’s investigation of 1851, and by “forcibly, perhaps warmly, informing His Excellency of the general estimate of the character and principles of Mr Collett, Mr White’s accuser.” Bridge then met with the Committee of the Church Society and reported his interview with the governor without telling them that he had communicated to the governor “any opinion” of Collett’s character.142

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On 9 November Hamilton told Bridge that the Hoyles and Robinson report did not change his understanding of Collett’s complaint and that the Church Society’s “system” allowed a clergyman to “put his price” upon the services he gave to the people. He could not accept Bridge’s estimate of Collett’s character, but even if he did, he still could not agree with putting “a price upon the Sacraments.”143 The committee shot back, chastising the governor for rejecting the evidence that they gave him against Collett’s charges and told him he was in conflict with the Royal Instructions by opposing the bishop.144 He had also cast aspersions on a fine clergyman. The society had not changed its principles since he became patron in January. It had not even changed them since 1846, when the committee approved “the plan” of Bishop Feild, which required that, except for the poor, people had to pay for services. Finally, the committee reprimanded the governor for referring to “alledged imputations on Mr Collett’s character” in official correspondence. Whatever was said privately at the interview was of concern only between him and Archdeacon Bridge. By alluding to Bridge’s comments about Collett, the governor had made public questions regarding Collett’s character. This was something the committee could only “deeply regret and deplore.” Remarkably, Bridge said the committee drew up this statement with much care and attention, not wanting to offend.145 Governor Hamilton responded through the colonial secretary, James Crowdy, that since the letter was “entirely derogatory” to his office, he declined “to receive” it. He kept it unofficially, copied it, and then returned it. The following day, 12 November, he resigned as patron of the society. On 15 November the committee sent an apology, saying they would be glad “to withdraw any expression which can be considered derogatory” and that they had written believing that he misunderstood the bishop. The governor declined to receive the reply, not even keeping it for copying, and forbade the committee to communicate with him any further. Bridge regretted that the governor did not keep it to be copied, since the committee would be “deprived of any benefit or credit” for the apology.146 Sometime in January 1854, Bishop Feild weighed in on the issue with his own pamphlet, An Address on the System of the Church Society in Newfoundland; Submitted to the Members of the Church of England by the Bishop of the Diocese. He probably wrote it just after receiving Bridge’s Statement. He included an appendix consisting of his letter to Collett of 26 February 1850, correspondence between himself and Governor Hamilton of 10–13 December 1853, written after he returned from Conception Bay, and his letters to the clergy at the anniversary of the Church Society in 1845. The occasion of Feild’s pamphlet was the fact that Governor Hamilton and “some influential and long-tried friends” had withheld their contributions to the ncs.

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Its purpose was to inform the diocese that Hamilton had “much misunderstood” the bishop’s letter to Collett and to “justify” himself and “show the real meaning and purpose of that letter,” which was definitely not to “permit a Clergyman to put his price upon the ordinances of the Church.” He quoted a section of the letter in which he told Collett that “Mr White is quite right in saying that I have directed him to require from every head of a family to whom God has given health and strength to labor in his calling, at least a quintal of fish.” Feild casuistically explained, nonetheless, that to “require” this annual contribution “does not require a clergyman to withhold the ordinances” from those who can pay it but refuse to. Strictly speaking, what Feild said is correct, but one has to wonder whether his clergy would catch the fine distinction. This is especially so since he went on to say that if a clergyman did withhold it, he would be “fully justified, and … I am prepared to justify him, in withholding the ordinances of the Church from any person, the head of a family, who being able, refuses … that small annual contribution.” Of course, the amount or “price” could not be set by the clergy.147 Feild gave reasons for requiring this payment. For example, if people were not required to pay, they might “demand or expect” services from Church of England clergy when they showed up, but “the day before they might have been of another communion.” He quotated from the Bible to support the principle that a minister can expect to be paid by the people who were being served. Since, through the spg, the clergy were being supported in part by those they did not serve, they were “justified in demanding” payment from those that they did serve. He also referred to “the system” adopted by the Church Society in 1845 and called attention to the results. By reducing the salary of each clergyman paid by the spg to £100, and supplementing it from the Church Society, more clergy were hired. On the south and west coasts, for example, the number of clergy had increased from two to nine, “all ordained and appointed by myself.”148 The spg had suggested as an incentive for parishioners to pay for services that the bishop remove clergy from any mission that did not make contributions to salaries equal to half what was paid by the spg. Feild said that he did not agree to do that, since it would punish those faithful people in the mission who did pay. Not only that, such a measure would play into the hands of those who did not pay: “Their very aim and desire in some instances would be gratified, and one of them would reign as Priest and King.”149 It would also provide an excellent opportunity for Methodists to move in and take over the territory. Feild opted for the Church of England to remain in the community and required his clergy to demand payment for their financial support where it was not willingly given.

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Feild wrote to Governor Hamilton on 10 December after returning from Conception Bay and expressed regret that the committee had used language “so hasty and unbecoming, and so derogatory to Your Excellency’s high position and office.” He noticed that they had apologized. He affirmed White as “a most exemplary Clergyman,” but he said of Collett, “I could wish … that your Excellency had known Mr Collett as long as I have.” He said he did not have the opportunity to defend himself to the governor since the governor had separated himself from the society that formerly he had praised as its official patron.150 He apologized for any part he or his clergy or friends had in that separation. Hamilton replied the same day, sympathizing with the bishop in having to “repudiate” the actions of the society and in having to choose “truth” over “friends.” He mentioned that he had sent the recent correspondence and resolution of the Church Society to the secretary of state for the colonies, whom he asked to bring the matter before the spg for a ruling. He told the secretary that “the main question rests upon the Bishop’s own letter to Mr Collett.” Bishop Feild responded that he was not sure what the governor was referring to in his letter to Collett. If the governor had not been “led” to view him with “distrust and dislike” and then “look elsewhere for information on Church matters,” this misunderstanding would not have come about. Governor Hamilton replied that the bishop should write to the spg “the sense” in which his letter to Collett should be read. He had no further points to make to the bishop and would not continue the discussion.151 However, Governor Hamilton did change his mind about extending the discussion, and in February 1854 published Comments upon a Recent Resolution of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, in a Letter to a Member of Her Majesty’s Council of That Colony.152 The pamphlet was a response to Bridge’s Statement and made public his letter of 8 December to the committee of the Church Society. This and his letter of 4 February to the society are the only new items in the pamphlet. At the beginning of his pamphlet, the governor pointed to a contradiction between the bishop and his archdeacon. Bishop Feild had written to the governor on 10 December 1853 apologizing for the committee in that their resolution to the governor was “so hasty and unbecoming, and so derogatory.” But in January 1854, Bridge had said that the resolution was composed “with the greatest deliberation; and every precaution the committee could employ, was taken.” Governor Hamilton pointedly asked which was correct.153 He then addressed what he believed was a main point of contention with the Church Society, that “the system appeared to permit a Clergyman to put his price upon the Ordinances of the Church.” The clergyman in Har-

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bour Buffett was “higgling” over the sum of four or five shillings and “assumed the exclusive right of the ability to pay.” So the question remained, “Who does fix the price?” The issue was not essentially different whether it was the local clergy, the bishop, or the Church Society, “a self-constituted body 200 miles off.” This issue was in fact a subset of a larger principle that Hamilton brought into focus and questioned, namely the right of the committee “to represent and control … the entire Clergy and Laity of the Church of England in this Colony.” In its reluctance to deal with this principle, Hamilton said, the committee “fastened with unfortunate tenacity upon the alleged unworthiness of Mr Collett’s character and the consequent falsehood of his statements.” He could not believe the “sophistries” that were resorted to. When Bridge met with him on 8 November, “the whole object of the interview” was to defame Collett’s character and persuade the governor to disbelieve his statements. Yet when Hamilton referred to the matter in his official letter to the committee, it was “grieved” that a private conversation about a “third party” had led to “aspersions” being cast on that person’s character. Was the committee now implying that Collett’s name was honourable? They had been trying to convince him of the “aspersions” cast on Collett’s character, and now they were making the governor the author of these very “aspersions.” He believed Collett was “an upright and respectable man,” whose “sturdy and genuine sentiments” had come “into collision with the views of a theologian evidently of a peculiar school.” To Collett was owed at least the credit for bringing into public focus “the urgent necessity of a reform of the system adopted by the Newfoundland Church Society.”154 One wonders how Governor Hamilton viewed his office to become involved in church affairs as he did. It is possible that he saw himself as representing the Queen as “defender of the faith.” As an evangelical he probably was in touch with local people who made him keenly aware that their expression of faith within the Church of England was being threatened by the bishop. When called upon by Bridge to agree in the defamation of Collett instead of listening to Collett’s grievance, Hamilton felt he had to take a stand and refer the matter of payment to the Church Society for church membership to the spg. The governor in this way attempted to procure popular religious freedom for a segment of the colonial society. His tenure in Newfoundland has not been given favourable reviews. Frederick Jones claimed, “There is no doubt that Ker Baille Hamilton exacerbated any conflict into which he entered.” He quoted Prowse’s estimate that he was “as unfit a man as the British Government could possibly have selected to fill the difficult position.” This is an extreme position. Contrary to Jones’s statement, Hamilton clearly did not enter “enthusiastically and even

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with rancour” into the controversy over the “refusal of sacraments to Anglicans unwilling to give financial support to their church.”155 We have seen that the issue involved not just granting freedom to those who because of their conscience were “unwilling” to pay. It was also a matter of whether those unable to pay were denied the services of the church. Moreover, it was not a question of paying to the church locally, but to the Church Society, a central authority under administration of Bishop Feild. Governor Hamilton, hearing about the matter in July or August 1853, took no action on it whatsoever until November. And all he did at that time was tell Archdeacon Bridge, who came knocking on his door collecting for the Church Society, that he could not in all conscience pay to the Church Society in light of Collett’s pamphlet. He did give him thirty-five pounds for the church locally.156 It was Bridge who refused the money and said that it must be paid to the Church Society, called a meeting of the society, and had them write a letter to the governor that, in the words of Bishop Feild, was “unbecoming, and so derogatory.”157 On 22 April, the Courier printed a letter from Haddon to Bridge, dated 20 February, also responding to White’s pamphlet. His purpose was to defend “the character of a just man,” Collett. Contrary to White’s statements, Collett was instrumental and helpful in building both the schoolroom and the teacher’s house in Harbour Buffett. White should have known about the teacher’s house, since it was built after his arrival in 1847. Collett contributed studs, flooring, and shingles, and gave White milk, meat, and wood. As for the settlement being peaceful and happy but for Collett, Haddon understood it was peaceful and happy until White’s arrival. He attacked Hoyles and Robinson, as he had in a former letter to Bridge. In that letter he conjectured that “it is the practice of professional gentlemen to cut and trim their legal opinions to suit the party who employs them.” In a personal letter to Collett he suggested that the legal opinion seemed “like an experiment upon the gullibility of the public.” Although to deal with it required patience, it did “afford some degree of amusement.”158 On 29 April Woods published another letter in which Haddon demanded that Bridge, as secretary to the committee of the Church Society, should “point out distinctly” why Collett and some members of his family were refused Holy Communion. He claimed that Collett, though he had refrained from taking revenge, can even “shew a club picked up in church, or literally, a junk of firewood, with which White threatened to fell Collett.” Haddon concluded that White and the Church Society “in their zeal to remove the imputation of tractarianism have disregarded … truth, justice and mercy.”159 The high point of the transatlantic reporting of the controversy in the press was 29 April 1854. In addition to Haddon’s third letter, the Courier

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printed an article from the Record of 23 March 1854 about Governor Hamilton’s pamphlet entitled Comments upon a Recent Resolution of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society. The Record had stated that Hamilton’s pamphlet confirmed the details of Collett’s pamphlet beyond anything they could have expected. The governor had demonstrated that the Church Society in Newfoundland was a “despotic and illegal institution” that was “destructive of the liberties of the Church of England.” The editor called Archdeacon Bridge the “Newfoundland high-priest” of an “evil system” that was guilty of “disgusting the middle classes, and oppressing the poor fishermen, whose children were refused the rites of the church.” It was “the grand instrument of priestly usurpation and tyranny in the colony.” On 30 March, the Record stated that the letters of the governor gave more evidence that the ncs was merely the instrument used by Bishop Feild to work “against every Evangelical influence” and to promote his own “extreme views.” The bishop, through the society, had turned the clergy into “tax-fixers and tax collectors.” The society had attempted to turn away charges against them “by vilifying the character of a respectable man.”160 Robert John Parsons of the Liberal-oriented Patriot joined in. He printed the two letters from Hamilton to the Church Society on the front page, and then commented on the controversy. He gave high marks to White for obeying the “instructions of his Superior, the Bishop,” a very pious man who demonstrated much zeal “to carry out the true doctrine and ritual observance of the Church of England.” Collett in Harbour Buffett, in contrast, was “the Quixotte [sic] of that district, seeking out visionary ecclesiastical oppressions to make battle with.” He was one of those “fickle and impulsive creatures, who desire to be their own prelates and priests.” Governor Hamilton demonstrated no wisdom either in thinking that Collett’s charges were “well grounded” or in aiding him in his “fanatical crusade.” Moreover, as governor he had no right “to interfere between the Bishop and his flock.” It was a matter “with which his Excellency had nothing to do.” Parsons wrote for a Catholic constituency and was an intense supporter of the movement for responsible government. In the past he had severely criticized Feild. For example, he reminded him at the consecration of his cathedral that the money to build it was “a great deal filched.” He saw Feild as one who wanted to maintain the status quo and viewed his efforts to subdivide the Protestant Education Grant as an attempt “to establish ‘by law’ a church ascendency which now only has existence ‘in fact.’”161 But when Governor Hamilton received the despatch on 22 March 1854 from the Duke of Newcastle that finally granted responsible government to Newfoundland, he did not move on it quickly enough for the Liberals.162 At that point Parsons was prepared to grab anything he could find to hurl at the governor. He

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did here, but he did not observe what he held in his hand. His argument against the governor becoming involved in church affairs was valid in principle. But in this case the church matters concerned a people being treated in a dictatorial manner. Parsons failed to investigate what was happening at Harbour Buffett. He seemed to be more interested in attacking the governor, and in doing so he sacrificed the reasonable claim of a people to have a say in their spiritual affairs. Ironically, he did this in the name of the democratic freedom of responsible government. On 29 April, too, Joseph Woods advertised in the Courier a final pamphlet dealing with the matter, featuring Thomas Edwards Collett. It was entitled The Church of England in Newfoundland, No. 2. Containing a Statement and Reply of Thomas E. Collett, Esq., J.P., A Brief Review of Proceedings Connected with the Clergy and Church in this Diocese, during the Past Few Years, and Observations and Additional Evidence in Confirmation of the Former Statements and in Refutation of the Attacks upon Them. The pamphlet has three sections. The first is a rebuttal of the “gross falsehoods” in White’s pamphlet. Collett attempted to do this through clarification, correction, and the provision of additional information. The largest section (pages 10–33) is a history of the ten years of turbulence after Bishop Feild arrived in Newfoundland with his Tractarian vision. The third section is an appendix of letters, affidavits, extracts from Bishop Feild’s charges of 1844 and 1847, and correspondence on controversies between Bishop Feild and the congregations at the Cathedral and St Thomas’s. The preface and the main section of the pamphlet were unlikely written by Collett since, unlike the first section, he did not sign them and there is no use of the first person. This main section is a contextual review of the “indications” to which Collett had drawn attention. The key issue addressed is religious freedom – “that degree of spiritual and mental and social freedom of the Laity, which the Holy Scriptures sanction, and happily the Rules of our Church, also, permit.” Since his arrival in Newfoundland, Bishop Feild had persistently set upon a course to totally envelop the Church of England in a suffocating Tractarian spirituality, despite the fervent desire of evangelical Anglicans to retain their freedom of religious expression. He had relentlessly endeavoured to replace “the preaching of the pure unadulterated Gospel, as Evangelical Churchmen view it” with the “extreme views of the Exeter School … the novelties of Tractarianism.” His determination to force this change was possibly surpassed only by his “haste,” so quickly did he proceed “to outrage the feelings of the people” with his Order and Uniformity in the Public Services of the Church, his charge to the clergy upon his arrival in 1844. It was the loss of freedom to be an evangelical member of the Church of England, due to these measures, that Collett was protesting

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at Harbour Buffett. White, to please his bishop, carried out his wishes with either “more zeal or less discretion” than some of his fellow clergy. The pamphlet noted that Robinson and Hoyles addressed only three of Collett’s seven charges. The author then rebutted their findings and pointed to the omission of the Ingram case. Yet Ingram was clearly refused baptism of his child and was clearly “in a state of poverty.” So much for “giving the Ministrations of the Church as freely and cheerfully to the poor as to the rich.” And so much for “clear and conclusive evidence against Collett’s charges.” There were two principles at issue. First, did spg missionaries have the right to “put a price upon the Sacraments?” Second, were the people “to have imposed upon them forms, ceremonies, and dogmas … not Evangelical or Scriptural?” The pamphlet claimed that the ncs never sanctioned “the compulsory part” of the plan that Bishop Feild ordered in his circular of 1845. In their resolution of 10 November 1853, the society were insinuating they did sanction it back in 1845. The writer also contested the significance of the Church Society’s income rising from £170 to £1,800 in seven years. This did not show that the society “steadily advanced in the affections and confidence of Churchmen of all ranks in Newfoundland.” First, it was money that had to be paid, or else one would be denied the services of the church. Second, before 1845 the Church Society was a “purely charitable association” for voluntary offerings that were in addition to the annual contributions to the salaries of the clergy. Then in 1845 Bishop Feild ordered that “all payments to the Clergy, except fees” be paid to the Church Society. Therefore, one sees “the boastful announcement vanishing into smoke.” The pamphlet concluded that for ten years the Church of England in Newfoundland had been “groaning under the incubus of a Tractarian Bishop … under cover of the Committee of the Church Society … directed and controlled by an Archdeacon of similar views.” By this means Bishop Feild had “contrived to fasten upon the unsuspecting Clergy and Laity a debasing system of inquisition and exaction, which is rapidly sapping the foundation of the Church.” The result of the system was to “degrade the intellect and enslave the soul.” It was the writer’s “confident expectation” that the people would be freed as they became enlightened through “this publication” and asserted themselves with the help of “Churchmen in England.”163 The Royal Gazette dropped a bombshell on the controversy on 6 June 1854 when it published a letter from the spg secretary, Ernest Hawkins, to the Duke of Newcastle, in which Hawkins stated that he had ruled four years ago and told Bishop Feild that the spg prohibited demanding money for the services of its clergy. In the letter of 22 August 1850, Hawkins had ruled “that a clergyman, wherever stationed, is bound to administer the Sacraments of the Church without regard to the point whether Church

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dues have been satisfied or not.” Feild, when he received a copy of the correspondence from Governor Hamilton, wrote on 2 June 1854 that he “had no recollection of the letter alluded to.”164 His response strains credulity, since he not only received the letter, but actually replied to it on 10 September 1850, telling Hawkins he disagreed with the policy. The effect of the spg ruling was “to strain out a gnat and swallow a camel” in saying that a bishop could withdraw the clergyman from the parish where dues were not paid, but that if the clergyman stayed he could not deny his services. At the time, Feild outright refused to obey the ruling and stated categorically that he would protect the clergyman: “I will not suspend him for refusing the rites of the Church to them who refuse to pay their Church dues.”165 Hawkins repeated the ruling again in his 22 April 1854 letter to the Duke of Newcastle that the spg “cannot assent to the position that a refusal to contribute would justify a Clergyman in withholding from a person, on account of his so refusing, any office of the Church. Such refusal, indeed, would be regarded as inconsistent with the condition on which his services were engaged by the Society.” A writer in the Courier on 10 June said that these documents and this judgment of the spg were “of incalculable importance to the interests of the Church of England in Newfoundland.” No longer could the Lord Bishop deny ordinances to a person who did not pay the Church Society as the result of “inability or conscientious objections.” He noted that Bishop Feild had been acting against the spg’s “Declaration of Principles” since “his Lordship’s letter to Mr Collett of the 26th February, 1850.” He looked forward to a change when people were motivated to give “by cords of love and kindness, not driven by threats of excommunication and denial of baptism and burial.” William Charles St John, editor of the Conception Bay Weekly Herald, printed the spg decision on 14 June on the front page and entitled it, “The Point Settled.”166 Indeed it was. The people had opposed the bishop and not just bent, but actually broke the iron lever that he had been using, contrary to the spg policy, to pry evangelical protest out of his diocese. In Harbour Buffett they could dance a jig and celebrate to a late hour. Nevertheless, one wonders how much the spg ruling changed matters within the church under Feild. The only change evident at the Church Society was a note added to the “Standing Rules” in their annual report published two weeks later: “While it is hoped that every Clergyman in the colony will make a yearly collection for the promotion of the objects of the Church Society, and impress upon every individual under his Pastoral charge, the obligations by which he is bound to contribute thereto, year by year, the system of the Church Society does not require any Clergyman to

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6.2 A winterhouse

withhold the ordinances of the Church in any case of refusal or neglect to pay towards his support.” At first glance this notice appears to be saying something new, but it is a mere sleight of hand; Bishop Feild had already clarified in his pamphlet that he never did require a clergyman to withhold the ordinances of the church from someone who did not pay to the church society, but that he would justify a clergyman who did so. Thus he continued unfaithful to the trust given him by the spg, who largely funded the clergy in his diocese. Two years later another of his clergy refused Collett Holy Communion and said that it was because he did not pay to the Church Society.167 In the summer of 1854 Bishop Feild decided it would be expedient to move White from Harbour Buffett to Harbour Breton. White was in Isle Valen when he received the offer on 5 June to replace J.G. Mountain. It was not until 22 October that he was able to arrange his departure, with his “household furniture, a heifer … two favourite sheep, dogs Nero and Neptune, Mrs White, five children and two servants with goods and chattels” on a boat from St John’s. He preached his farewell sermon to a full church, “becoming so affected as to be hardly able to proceed.” The mission of Harbour Buffett bade farewell to William Kepple White in the Times on 31 January 1855. The farewell was signed by forty-two people, not a large number, who stated that his departure would “be long regretted by all of us.” White

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in his reply on 21 April 1855 said that he and his family would “always look back upon their residence in Harbor Buffet with feelings of the liveliest satisfaction,” especially because the people rallied around him “at a time when exalted personages and venerated names were misled by a piece of heartless chicanery, to imagine that I was unfaithful to my trust.”168 Bishop Feild replaced White at Harbour Buffett with William Frederick Meek, the son of William Meek, a teacher with the nss. Meek arrived in Harbour Buffett in December 1854, recently ordained. It appears that the relationship did not improve for some time between a portion of the people and the Church of England in the community. In 1857 Meek spoke of the need to enlarge the church in response to the “rapid increase in population,” but there was still “a small faction that opposed both my predecessors.” Probably referring to Collett, he said their “principal mover” was “of considerable tact and cunning.” According to Collett, before Christmas Communion in 1856, Meek had required all who were going to “communicate” to apply to him. Collett did so, but Meek, who said he had Feild’s support, told him he would be refused because he had not paid to the Church Society. Collett went to the communion rail on Christmas Day, but “his Reverence carried his point passing me with both the bread and wine.” The next day Collett wrote to Charles Simms in St John’s that nothing had happened since he received communion from Meek in July and from Bishop Feild in Harbour Buffett the previous year.169 Charles Simms, a member of St Thomas’s, was the chairman of the local committee of the Colonial Church and School Society (nss).170 He was also the brother of James Simms, whom Collett first worked for in St John’s and who in 1856 was the assistant judge of the Supreme Court. Charles Simms sent Collett’s letter to a George Berley, a friend at Liverpool, who sent an extract of it to Secretary Hawkins of the spg. Berley reminded Hawkins that Meek was under the pay of the spg and that the secretary should end such treatment as he was giving Collett. If Meek were allowed to continue such actions, he would “bring discredit on your Society and drive members of the Church of England to become dissenters.” Hawkins replied that he would ensure the matter was given due attention. Berley told Simms he was concerned that he would not get a reply from Hawkins because he, a Protestant Episcopalian, had cancelled his subscription to the spg because of its Tractarian leanings. Collett also wrote to Henry Deck, the secretary of the Colonial Church and School Society in London. He had concluded by then that Meek must have refused him Communion because of his advocacy for the nss. At a meeting of the Protestant Education Board he had called for a grant to W.S. Ward, the society’s teacher at Harbour Buffett, but Meek op-

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posed him. Collett was amazed that the son of a nss schoolmaster could be so against the society.171 Bishop Feild was successful in supplanting the nss in Harbour Buffett. In 1857 the nss “relinquished the school and … sold the premises,” where Ward had been teaching for four years.172 His salary had been funded largely through the proceeds of an estate valued at £400 left to the nss by Thomas Russell, “a poor fisherman, residing at the time of his death, at a neighbouring spot called Woody Island.”173 When he arrived in 1853, he was unable to teach in the school that had been built during the time of Haddon,174 so Collett temporarily provided him with “a nice little school room upstairs” in his house. Bishop Feild refused to hand over the house and school, despite a petition requesting it, “signed by a majority of the heads of the protestant families, by whom the premises were erected,” so the St John’s committee of the nss had to buy another. Collett stated to the society that “there is but little doubt in my mind that that refusal was considered as a finishing blow to deprive this locality and in fact the whole of this Bay of the great benefit of your Schools.” Only the great effort of the St John’s committee kept that from happening. The school was attended not only by children, but also by parents “who appear to feel their own inferiority by contrasting the attainments of their children with their own ignorance.” The society schools, in addition to providing education, were one of the “bulwarks … stemming the increase of semi-popery or tractarianism which unfortunately pervades the land.”175 In the summer of 1857, however, the nss decided not to support a teacher, and the recently bought premises were sold. Ward moved to Isle Valen, where he continued to teach for the nss, but was supported by a thirtypound grant from the Protestant Board. James Burton, “a well-conducted young man [who] deserves much credit for his self-improvement,” continued to teach at Harbour Buffett for the Protestant Board.176 Thus, along with asserting his authority over the appointment of clergy in the parish, Feild won two institutional victories for his Tractarianism in Harbour Buffett. To the extent that evangelicalism remained, it continued as a popular religion enriched by the Prayer Book and the Word.

sound island: a rejection of tractarianism Sound Island is a prominent example of a people who rejected the Tractarianism of Feild and his local agent, White, and chose the evangelicalism of Methodism instead. For decades the people of Sound Island had welcomed both Anglican and Methodist clergy, that is, during the rare visit from either.

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The Methodist missionary generally visited in the fall on his trip from Burin to inner Placentia Bay, following the example set in 1818 by the first Methodist missionary to Burin, John Lewis.177 Visits by the Church of England clergy were even rarer. John Evans may have visited during his tenure in Placentia, which ended in 1798, and Charles Blackman came from his mission in Ferryland in 1825. He noted at the time that John Hollett, a resident, read “the prayers of the church” weekly to an assembled congregation.178 But three years later the Methodist missionary William Wilson was happy to announce that Hollett was leading a Methodist class meeting on Sound Island.179 Yet when Archdeacon Edward Wix came by in 1835, ten years after the last Anglican clergyman, everything was praiseworthy in an Anglican fashion. First he went to the winter quarters of John Hollett Jr at Piper’s Hole and had a service in which eighteen persons attended and was quite pleased with the singing, as he was later at the house of his father. He made it a point to state that he was impressed with the “demeanor of the congregation” and their responses to the prayers. He was quite taken with a Prayer Book, printed in 1834 and sent to Hollett by a clergyman from Essex, who sent it along with his annual packet of books.180 Wix’s account of a rare winter visit to the head of Placentia Bay is a revealing vignette of popular spirituality. Residents were expressing their devout faith freely and unhindered, pursuing their spirituality without clergy or formal Christianity. Methodist and Church of England missionaries were welcomed and invited to take part in their Protestant worship. Wix himself in the publication of his journal appealed to the generosity of “the friends of evangelical truth,” which was doing well on Sound Island and at Piper’s Hole where people were enjoying independence and freedom in the expression of their faith. Neither Wilson from Burin nor Wix from St John’s attempted to exert any ecclesiastical weight during his visit, since both realized that they were quite out of range of any centre of their authority. They knew they could not push, except possibly to say, “You must be born again.” They could only attempt to draw people to their respective versions of the faith through appeals to scripture and possibly to the patriotic association of their faith with England. In either case they granted that the people of their own volition would make their spiritual decisions. They knew that the popular religion in the form of the common Anglican Protestantism of the people of inner Placentia Bay promoted a welcome to either Methodist or Anglican clergy. As the clergy increased in number and strength, they were dissatisfied with this unity and pushed for a division among the people, especially when the Church of England made a concerted effort to take Placentia Bay. Bishop Spencer in 1841 laid out the ambitious plan to build five

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churches in the bay, one of which was to be erected on Sound Island. His clergyman William Jeynes had a relationship with Methodists that appeared to harden over time. He had to tolerate a Methodist presence in the centre of his parish, Harbour Buffett. On his first trip to Sound Island, Jeynes reported that he was welcomed by Hollett, baptized several people, performed a marriage, and now men were prepared to go into the woods to cut timber for the church. Only two years later, with the church building program stalled, his fellow clergyman, George Cowan, thought that though they were polite and friendly, many of them were “thoroughly prejudiced in favour of the Wesleyans.”181 By 1845, a year after Feild’s arrival, the Methodist missionary Samuel Sprague claimed that Jeynes preached more “against dissent than against sin.” Sprague also wrote in November 1845 that he just got back from Placentia Bay and was shocked to be shown there a spck tract “full of Puseyism bigotry and falsehood” that had been “left by a certain Episcopal Missionary.” That missionary may not have been Jeynes, since in mid-September Feild, accompanied by Bridge, had been to Isle Valen in addition to Harbour Buffett in the Hawk and either of them could have left the tract.182 Needless to say, the clergy were doing their best to divide the people and eliminate that common fellowship they had experienced for over twenty years. As for Feild’s clergyman, William Kepple White, his view of Methodists and Methodism may be gained from his statement to the missionary John Brewster that his church services were “a solemn mockery to God.” He went on to say that as a clergyman he would provide services only to those Protestants who promised never to attend another Methodist meeting. If they did not so promise he would not baptize their children, marry them, or bury them.183 Being a young man and out to change the world, he immediately took steps to take Sound Island for Bishop Feild. But the people of Sound Island were not so easily divided. When White offered them thirty-five pounds for their building just after his arrival in Placentia Bay in the fall of 1847, they refused. Moreover, they would not allow him to baptize their children since they were expecting the Methodist missionary on his annual visit from Burin. That was the limit for White. He, now a deacon, “warned them of the sin of keeping their children from him,” a real “ordained Minister,” and waiting for “one that was not.”184 So White lost Sound Island to the Methodists. The people refused to be dictated to, and retained their freedom to associate with whom they wanted. His brand of religion was totally foreign to that freedom and ecumenical generosity of feeling that was their way of life. They had no great display of battle or clash of arms. They simply turned over the welcome mat. In the 1857 census there were only two Anglicans on Sound Island.185

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In conclusion, Harbour Buffett provided an attractive site for a scattered people to resettle in a central location where the services of a church and school could be provided. Motivated by this goal, freely and independently, they assiduously applied themselves, even while they, as new settlers, were engaged in the labour-intensive task of building their own houses, wharves, and stages. The resettlement in Harbour Buffett occurred just at the time that the Church of England was expanding into Placentia Bay under the evangelical Bishop Spencer. The community had an evangelical emphasis from its beginning, for, like other Protestant settlements in the bay, it had been served by Methodist ministers from Burin. Like Haystack and Woody Island, it had a core of Methodist sympathizers, though it did not tend so far in that direction as Sound Island. Beginning in 1836 with the services of Thomas Edwards Collett and later John Haddon, who were schoolteachers, lay readers in church, and Sunday school teachers, its evangelical Anglicanism was further developed by the nss and became robust. It was cultivated in day school and Sunday school, preached in church, and reinforced by such people in the community as the Bendles. With no clergy for two years, Harbour Buffett had a flourishing evangelical Anglicanism by the time of White’s arrival in 1847. It was this vibrant local faith that proved such a stumbling block to him and to his bishop, Edward Feild. White did not step into a religious vacuum in Harbour Buffett, instead he came when religion was at full tide. Trained by and loyal to his bishop in Tractarian Anglicanism, young and inexperienced in his first pastoral charge, he soon found it a challenge to carry out the bishop’s program. The first evidence of opposition was in the required subscription to the ncs. When William Kepple White, the Anglican clergyman at Harbour Buffett, began to carry out the financial requirements of the bishop and the Church Society, he encountered local resistance, particularly from Thomas Edwards Collett and his immediate family. White countered with refusals of baptism. While ostensibly the issue was money, the more substantial conflict at Harbour Buffett was Bishop Feild’s use of the Church Society to carry out his new Tractarian program. In his opposition Collett appealed to the public through the press. The evangelical London Record, already on a crusade against Tractarianism, enthusiastically broadcasted the Newfoundland conflict in England. In the pamphlet war that followed Feild, Bridge and White used defamation as their main tactic against the people in Harbour Buffett who were protesting that their spiritual values were being violated. The person who entered the church, walked up to the chancel, cut the candles on the altar into pieces, and “strewed” them about committed an act of far-reaching symbolic proportions: a palpable demonstration of re-

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sistance to Bishop Field and his clergyman in their attempt to fracture his spiritual values. It was the quintessential act of protest against a system of control that attempted to deprive people of authority over their spiritual affairs. It was thus “an outward and visible sign” of both the church’s violation of the belief system of the people and their opposition to it. In this way, the church member gave a lasting voice to the two-thirds of the community who opposed Field by boycotting his Tractarian ritual but were not equipped to produce a Collett pamphlet. Though the battle received much publicity and the evangelicals won the pamphlet war, Feild was able to use his authority as bishop to maintain control within the church. Since his main obstacle locally was the evangelical nss school in Harbour Buffett, Feild supplanted it with one that was totally under his control. Yet people continued an evangelical Anglicanism enriched by the Prayer Book and the Word in their homes, boats, and stages, and on their flakes. They even maintained their own spirituality within the Gothic setting. In 1926, three-quarters of a century later, they were still resisting. The High Church cleric A. Shorter, supported by a local merchant, tried again to place candles on the altar, but the more than thirty men at the vestry meeting refused to grant him permission.186 Yet church culture accommodated itself, at least externally, to the Tractarian tendencies over time. When the Congregationalist John Hope Simpson visited Harbour Buffett in 1935 he found it “disconcerting, and inappropriate for the spiritual intimacy of the service” when he “saw a very high church young man go through his ritual performance.”187 By then many in the settlement no longer attended. Despite the gains at Harbour Buffett, Feild and his missionary lost heavily in inner Placentia Bay. The people refused to adhere to the new articulation of Anglicanism out of Oxford, with its emphasis on exclusion of others, as the clergy attempted to enclose religion through their heightened sacramental authority. The architectural expression of that authority was the chancel. From it the clergyman dispensed grace and carried that eminence in his person to exert his will throughout the community. Anglicans on Sound Island considered the price White offered for the church and for his service too high, and opted instead for that freedom in religion they had known and enjoyed long before his arrival.

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7 South Coast: A People “Attending the Church Service and the Worship of the Methodists Indiscriminately” Before 8 o’clock the church-ship was safely anchored in Lamaline Roads … At the earnest, often-repeated request of the inhabitants, the Bishop consented to let them remove the church-ship from the road to the harbour, which has not been attempted at any former visit on account of the shoals and rocks, which render the harbour difficult of ingress and egress. Immediately after Morning Service, a stout crew, with a pilot, took the vessel from the road, but, before they could get round to the harbour, the tide, which was high enough at starting, had fallen very low, and the church-ship grounded on the bar, and remained fast upwards of three hours. She floated again at half-tide, and was brought safely into the harbour. [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1863,” 3–4 July 1863

J.D. Rogers drew attention to the meteoric rise of Burin in the first half of the nineteenth century and suggested that its proximity to St Pierre was the reason for its rise. After the Napoleonic Wars, St Pierre had become a great engine of commerce as “the baiting-place of the big bounty-fed Bankers of old France.”1 Annual bounty payments rose from 365,000 francs in 1817 to 4,400,000 francs in 1829. And it was not only bait, but cod oil, and even cod that was sold or traded through Burin in substantial quantities.2 Almost anything Newfoundlanders had to sell could be sold at St Pierre even decades later – “crates of live fowl, crates of live lobsters, barrels and tubs, scallops, cocks and hens, mussels gathered from the rocks at low tide, sea urchins, wrinkles (or sea snails) … and birch and withrod brooms … birch junks used for fuel in the bakeries.”3 They would return with cordage, canvas, tea, sugar, molasses, tobacco, rum, brandy, clothing, furniture, and other manufactured goods. These goods were without the tariff-added expense

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of those sold by St John’s merchants, in an arrangement that one Fisheries Report stated, “considerably benefitted the fishermen.”4 Of course it was not just the French who built up Burin. The Spurriers, for instance, had made it the centre of their mercantile empire in Placentia Bay before the halcyon business years of the Napoleonic Wars. When Christopher Spurrier declared bankruptcy in 1830 due in part to a postwar decline in revenue and a disastrous year in the fishery in 1829, after a life of lavish spending, such as on Upton House outside Poole, he left in Burin to his creditors “a large house with eight bedrooms, no fewer than six stores, offices, coopers’ and carpenters’ shops, drying ‘flakes’ which could take 900 quintals of fish, and even batteries of guns to protect the stations from attack.”5 Yet while the Methodist missionary John Lewis could enjoy his port and sherry with Spurrier agents and captains, his observation was that the people lived under “the lash of the merchants.”6 But with the French there was a break for the fisherman. If he sold bait, he could sell his fish fresh, for cash instead of credit, and due to French bounties, at a good price. Meanwhile the British merchants and their agents at St John’s and Harbour Breton, seeing the money go elsewhere, cried foul and waxed on about patriotism and the duty of paying tariffs. Soon after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the Methodists and the Church of England sent missionaries to Burin. The latter did not serve the people well. Thomas Grantham arrived in 1816, but he vacated the area after only a few months, complaining about his pay. Incredibly it was more than two decades before the Church of England sent another missionary to Burin, George Cowan, in 1841, but he too was gone within a year.7 Midway between Grantham and Cowan there was a flurry of generally brief visitations. Charles Blackman from Ferryland, who remained for nearly two weeks in 1825, held four services and reported that the people “rejoiced” that they could attend “the sacred services of that Church, in whose faith and principles they were bred.” Bishop John Inglis of Nova Scotia held a confirmation service during his 1827 visit to Newfoundland and noted that William Tulk had moved on to St Lawrence and was lay-reading and schoolteaching there. Despite neglect for over a decade when William Bullock visited in the fall of 1829, he thought that the people were “still strictly Episcopalian” and told them they could expect a clergyman soon. Edward Wix, the newly appointed archdeacon, followed during the fall of the next year for a couple of services in the courthouse, noting that the “Wesleyan Dissenters” had taken over the chapel “which formerly had been our own.” Not being able to supply a clergyman, he recommended John Woundy to the spg as a lay reader and schoolmaster in an attempt to maintain a Church

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of England presence. When James Robertson was sent along the south coast in 1830, he again recommended John Woundy to the spg and judged that the Methodists were “much the less numerous” of the Protestant population.8 Regardless, for the next decade Burin was not a priority for the Church of England. Meanwhile the Methodists had maintained missionaries in Burin ever since John Lewis arrived in the summer of 1817. At Carbonear on 16 January 1816 John Gosse had chaired a meeting to call on the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society to send more missionaries to Newfoundland, and Burin, with its large number of Protestants, was a primary designation. The Methodist Magazine omitted mentioning that in a previous meeting a principal motivation was that “the Episcopalians are now doing all they can to prejudice the minds of the people against us.” But that comment probably referred more to Conception Bay and the northeast coast. The people at Burin, stung with Grantham’s abrupt departure, welcomed Lewis with open arms and gave him the courthouse to preach in.9 But after ministering and preaching for twenty years, without Anglican competition, the Methodists could not boast great success in Burin. It was not until 1838 that membership reached 100, and then it plateaued and actually had a slight decline for the next decade.10 Methodism was about conversion, a religion of the heart. It had feeling at its centre. When Hannah Goddard testified, “I enjoyed an indescribable joy from a sense of my acceptance with God through Jesus Christ,” John Lewis was himself elated.11 Seeing in her conversion his purpose for being a Methodist missionary, he wrote, “This is true Methodism. May God give us more of this stamp.” Similarly, John Smithies spoke of a time at Burin: “We had a sweet melting season – to hear … some newly awakened souls was truly delightful.”12 Yet the membership of the converted is a somewhat misleading statistic in gauging the effectiveness of Methodism. It was determined by people’s weekly attendance at class meetings in which the devout met in a group of up to twenty or even more, under a duly appointed lay leader for fellowship, prayer, sympathetic instruction, and helpful counsel. The Methodist historian Neill Semple called the class meeting “the essential and distinguishing institution of Methodism,” “a training ground for exhorters and lay preachers” who were so effective in the spread of Methodism.13 In Burin, class meetings spread out in its “cluster of islands and peninsulas” would have been particularly effective.14 Still the majority who called themselves Methodists did not attend class meetings. Thus the 1845 census showed that nearly half of the Protestants of Burin, over 500, were Methodist.15 A diffusive effect of Methodism in Burin to the mid-nineteenth century was its evangelical effect on the Church of England there. When Spencer

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visited in the summer of 1843, though he was the bishop, he had a difficult time telling Anglicans from Methodists, like a woodsman who can’t tell spruce from fir. The main problem seemed to be that they stood together and were too united. It was not just that James England, the Methodist missionary, had closed down “the Meeting House” so that many of his flock could come out to hear Bishop Spencer on Sunday at his service at the courthouse. It was more the general habit of the people of “attending the church service and the worship of the Methodists indiscriminately.” He was not consoled when he found from Benjamin Fleet, his deacon and schoolteacher, that during the winter his congregation was not over thirty, and his school had not over twenty-four students. But he appeared to be satisfied when told that “the very great distance between the exceedingly small hamlets” that make up Burin prevented them from coming to a single school.16 Transhumance was likely still a feature of the Burin population causing the low winter turnout. It had been particularly pronounced in the mid-1820s when William Wilson, the Methodist missionary, saw his congregation reduced from three hundred to not more than twenty as the people vacated Burin in November. Families travelled to their winter quarters at places like Freshwater Pond and Mortier Bay to cut firewood and timber for boats, wharves, and fencing, and sundry other uses. There could be no fishing without a fine supply of wood. Wilson must have been shocked, preaching to a full church and then almost left alone with himself and his pulpit. The next winter he decided to take action, followed his people, and went to live in winter quarters himself.17 Without mentioning winter quarters, Bishop Spencer saw the answer to a thin Anglican attendance in sending “a clergyman in full orders … as soon as possible” to Burin. He obtained a promise from the people to pay “not less than” thirty pounds annually to the Church Society. But having arrived from Bermuda in the middle of June, in a little more than two months Spencer was off again, this time back to Jamaica to serve as bishop in the Caribbean.18 Meanwhile in Burin the people had to wait nearly another decade for their minister “in full orders.”19 This meant that during the 1846 September gale there was no Anglican clergyman at all in Burin – deacon or priest. Fleet was gone when they needed him most. The spg reported the “grievous deficiency” that forty-five fishermen had drowned and there was no clergyman to minister to and comfort the wives and children.20 They did not mention the Methodist missionary at Burin, Samuel Sprague. Bishop Feild could not help, since he himself was nearly drowned in “that dreadful hurricane” when rushing across the Atlantic to collect for his new cathedral from the fire funds donated in England.21 St John’s itself was dealing with the destruction of its

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June fire, so there was little attention in its newspapers on the devastating effects of the 19 September hurricane in the outports. Hence there is little about it in the records. Sprague reported to the Wesleyan Methodist Society in London the devastation of that gale: Eleven large boats carrying four men each were lost together with their crews, and a few houses. Nine of these Boats and the principal part of the crews belonged to Members of our Society or congregation. The stroke in many cases has been dreadfully severe. In several instances Mothers and Fathers far advanced in life have lost two or three sons and have thus been left without help when seemingly least able to lose it. Many widows and a great number of children have been left in a state of destitution. Independent of these things the season is one of unparalleled distress. The fishery which is the principal dependance of the people has been next to a total failure. And the potato, the only food of many of the poorer classes, have nearly all perished. So general is the distress throughout the country that the government can do very little in meeting it. The Suppliers and Merchants already involved in difficulties have ceased in a great measure to credit and there is reason to believe that there are hundreds of families in the land without provisions to last them for one month of the coming winter. What is worse. Without any human prospect of getting it. Many who have been in circumstances to help their poorer neighbours in years past are now without means themselves. These things together with the losses and consequent depression occasioned by the conflagration of St John’s render the prospect of the country in a temporal point of view exceedingly gloomy. There is every reason to fear that ere half the Winter has expired very many cases of actual starvation will have taken place.22 Likely some of the people became endeared to the Methodists during the time of their distress, since the Methodists had a missionary. An extended time of poor fishing and potato blight began in 1846. Sprague wrote to the Public Ledger in August of the following year that people were already at the very limit of survival. During the previous winter those who normally were “respectable and easy in their circumstances” had to line up for relief. In addition there were “men and women by scores, many of them nearly bare-foot and naked, shivering with cold and hunger, and coming from a distance to implore aid for themselves and their starving children.” Now as fall approached, people were already just “one remove from actual starvation.” After last year’s blight, people had to eat the few potatoes they

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had in order to survive the winter, then had none to plant in the following summer. Fishermen had not been able to obtain supplies from the merchants since their credit was cut off. When they did catch a few fish, they had to sell them green to purchase the day’s bread. For want of bait they could not fish off Cape St Mary’s. As for widows, orphans, and the elderly left bereft from last year’s gale, and those not fishing, there was even less hope of survival. The winter looked grim.23 It was into these distressing times that Feild sent Cyrus Gathercole with instructions to press for collections for the Church Society from every member of the Church of England in Burin. The language of Feild and Bridge became stricter, almost shrill, on this point as the poverty deepened. In the 1847 report it was stated that the “per head” fee did “not seem to be a matter of choice.” The next year the clergy were “to go from house to house,” whether they wanted to or not – for some were baulking – for now the fee “cannot any longer be considered a matter of choice.” And finally, in 1849 Feild told the clergy to “use every exertion” to collect the funds.24 Similarly the spg in their published report for 1847 reported that despite the failure of the fishery, the destruction of the St John’s fire, and the hurricane, the collection of an annual fee of a dollar per head was “sound and just,” and quoted Bishop Feild saying to the new Governor Gaspard Le Marchant that he was in support of calling on every member to contribute – “the rich bountifully, and the poor cheerfully” – as had been “strongly and eloquently recommended” by his predecessor, Governor John Harvey. Harvey was now gone off to Nova Scotia to greener pastures, and while the “trifling amount” he had called for – now a dollar per head, not per family – may have seemed trifling for him, it was not trifling to most Anglicans in Burin with hunger gnawing at their stomachs. Governor Le Marchant replied in nuanced fashion that he hoped people would contribute “as the season of trial and adversity passes away from the island … to the utmost extent of their means.”25 The Methodist missionary George Ellidge wrote in 1847 from Port de Grave that his people were “paralyzed by poverty.” He noted that in the previous year the spg had called Newfoundland “the poorest of our colonies” and said that his judgment after twenty-three years was that “if it be not the poorest, it is very poor, very poor.” He suggested that if Newfoundland had only a population of 60,000 instead of nearly 100,000 it would be better off. He did not mind having to collect saltfish instead of cash, though some might think it beneath their rank to collect fish in their arms, for “fish is the currency of Newfoundland.” The doctor, merchant, and gentleman in St John’s were all lined up to be paid in fish. But it particularly pained him that he was asking for donations from the poor. “Sometimes we can scarcely get a respectable householder to go with us and if he does there is a dan-

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ger lest his sympathies should run more with the poor people than with the Preacher and the case is exceedingly difficult.”26 But it wasn’t just that. He felt the pain of the contradiction in his own soul. Rather poignantly he stated the plight of the poor man and of finding himself at his door: If I were to look at your children without shoes &c, I might say it were more proper that I should give you something than that I should receive anything from you. And looking at the next house with their rind instead of glass, and their poverty, rags coming through the window, I might say the same thing of them, and so of many in the neighbourhood. But what then? We should have to tell the gentleman in London who sends us and expect that we should get a portion of our salary from you that we could get people to hear us, but we could not obtain anything towards our support. And the result would be that Preachers would be sent to those who would contribute towards their support, and are now asking for them, and you would to be left without. Religion did not make you poor but found you so, and if there be anything like partiality in the Bible, it is partiality towards the poor man. The Religion of Jesus Christ is the poor man’s religion. We are the servants of the poor, and the poor need the comforts of religion. But Ellidge was living with the poor out in the outports. He knew the reality of people’s lives, and his heart went out to them. No doubt some of the Anglican clergy felt the same who were not collecting the fee that Feild, Bridge, and the cloistered rich of the St John’s Church Society demanded. At least the Methodists were just asking. But what of the young deacons sent out by Bishop Feild and ordered “to use every exertion” to collect the money? What would they do? The rich man ignored Lazarus, but at least he did not demand anything from him. As Gathercole proceeded to Burin in 1847, this was a question he would have to face. And another was how much he would press Feild’s Tractarianism in an evangelical Protestant town. The Methodist John Brewster, another missionary on his way to Burin, called him a “thoroughgoing Puseyite,” and Samuel Sprague, who was about to leave, surmised, after a few dealings with them, that both Gathercole at Burin and White at Harbour Buffett were “men after the Bishop’s own heart and are very zealous in their endeavour to oppose the Wesleyans.”27 Like White, he and William Rozier, sent to Bay Roberts and later to Lamaline, were deacons fresh out of Feild’s Theological Institution, which he attended after Feild had terminated the evangelical Charles Blackman as principal and had introduced such High Church texts as Christo-

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pher Wordsworth’s Theophilus Anglicanus, which taught Tractarian doctrines such as baptismal regeneration, the apostolic succession, and the auricular confession. Frederick Jones stated the college was “a remarkable example of Tractarian semi-monastic ideals applied in a missionary situation.”28 But Cyrus Gathercole did not play the monk in Burin. Feild came by in the Hawk within Gathercole’s first year at Burin and noted that men had drowned in the hurricane of 1846, and that the region was so destitute in 1847 that many families had to live all winter on Indian meal alone. He did not mention to what degree he pressed Gathercole to collect for the Church Society – perhaps not much, since he had to tread gingerly lest he drive them even further to the Methodists. He did say that he still had money given him by “my friends” as a response to the 1846 fire that he “could apply towards the relief of the most distressed here.” To get out of poverty, many would migrate “to the southern parts of the island” to the west if they could. He noted that many of the parents of the Methodists who made up one-third of the population “were Church people” and that in Burin, Gathercole, whose courage he commended, had “many adversaries.” He also lamented the hundreds of neglected “members of the Church” in Lamaline. Though he had only 12 people receiving the sacrament in Burin, out of an Anglican population of over 500, he still noted that the Anglican congregation was “much advanced” since his last visit in 1845 when he had assigned no clergyman to Burin and simply had two services in the courthouse and left. Neither did Gathercole have anyone to be confirmed, and Feild excused him for that too. It is surprising that Feild was satisfied with so little at Burin, a major centre on the south coast. His only alarm came later back in St John’s when he heard that Gathercole had taken ill and, like the two before him, had “but small prospect” of continuing to minister.29 Gathercole recovered and continued his ministry to Anglicans at Burin for thirteen years. He was the driving force behind a new Gothic church, which Feild consecrated on 11 August 1850. Designed by Feild’s architect, William Hay, “a committed Gothicist,” it was the first church in the diocese to be of cruciform shape and had “windows … of an ecclesiastical character,” probably meaning lancet, which were “quite new in this country.” The writer to the Times thought that it excelled in keeping architectural form and function in balance, calling it “a model both for beauty and convenience.”30 Yet it had a “very low” roof.31 Despite the brand new Gothic box, Gathercole made little progress. Actually he was unable even to maintain the status quo, for in ten years the Methodists forged ahead, having a population of 50 fewer than the Anglicans in the 1845 census and nearly 150 more than they in the 1857 census. It is obvious the people were resisting

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Feild and his representation of Tractarianism in Burin. But it was in the next decade that the smoke revealed a fire. The 1869 census showed that people had opposed Feild and his Tractarianism to such a striking degree that Methodists nearly tripled Anglicans in the Protestant population.32 There were at least three reasons for this. The first was that Gathercole loved women, or, at least the people thought that he loved women. First there was Dinah Vey. On a July day in 1858, soon after the Church Society meeting, Feild received a heady letter from Charles Fox Bennett of the committee stating that Gathercole “had been guilty of some improprieties” with Dinah, an unmarried woman, and as a result she became pregnant, and with his help had left Burin, gone to St John’s, then to Nova Scotia, and was at that time in Boston. At least, everybody in Burin thought it was Gathercole’s child, and this “had caused the greater portion of the most respectable and other Inhabitants of Burin to desert the Church.” But it got even deeper than that. Francis Moran, the doctor of Burin from whom Bennett received the news, added that “there were other scandals imputed to Mr Gathercole.” They may have had something to do with two other children being born in the place with fathers unknown, and some were pinning paternity on Gathercole. Then there was Miss B. She was “a handsome young woman” and Gathercole had her as his “only companion and servant” at his house for two years, giving “great offense” to many who thought that something naughty was going on. A large number of the congregation attended the Methodist church in protest. Feild did not believe any of it. He thought of Gathercole as a “faithful Missionary” and called him “my friend and fellow-helper.”33 He sent a clerical tribunal to Burin to look into the matter and they found the charges against their fellow clergyman to be “without proof.” Feild totally agreed with them. But then Gathercole caught Feild by surprise. While Dinah was in the United States, Gathercole went there on a visit, whereupon Dinah returned to Burin without her child and lived with her mother. Gathercole did not return, but resigned his mission instead. People thought it was because he could not face Dinah. Feild thought Gathercole was still innocent but was frustrated with him that he would not explain anything to him. He decided he had to go to Burin himself to get a closer look and salvage what he could. He found that, instead of his people being united against the Catholics or the Methodists, as they should be, they were “divided, distracted, at variance, in such a tangle of disputes and jealousies, that pull which string you will, you seem only to make the knot tighter or harder to be unloosed.” There were the Gathercole faction who believed him innocent, the anti-Gathercole faction who wanted to return to the church but others had taken their seats, which they wanted back, the George Hooper

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7.1 Great Burin

faction who wanted him to be the new clergyman, and the anti-Hooper faction who did not. If Hooper came, they said, they wouldn’t leave the church but would “never pay a farthing towards it.” Feild made a decision. He would transfer William Rozier from Lamaline. The only problem with that was that nobody liked him and one group even “presented a protest against” his appointment. Feild, not about to be influenced by popular protest, called Rozier to Burin and left for St John’s.34 But to many in Burin he made a bad decision. Burin had many evangelical Anglicans who were sympathetic to Methodism, and Rozier certainly was not. If John Brewster thought Gathercole was a “thoroughgoing Puseyite,” he was nothing compared to William Rozier. Shortly after he was transferred to Lamaline, Rozier provoked Methodists by rebaptizing those who had been baptized by their clergy. Methodist missionaries from Grand Bank had provided services to the people of Lamaline over the years, but previously there had also been a rare passing visit from a Church of England clergyman. John Harris, “the first clergyman [from the Church of England] the majority of them ever saw, and the only one who had ever been in the place,” visited from St John’s in 1806 and “baptized 75, one third of whom were adults, and many of them very old.” James Robertson baptized 14 children in 1830.35 But since 1831 Methodist missionaries had performed 76 baptisms, 18 of which had been rebaptized by Rozier on 21 April 1851 at Lamaline in preparation for confirmation by Bishop Feild during his approaching visit. This was an insult to Methodists and to their missionaries

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who provided the services, namely Ingham Sutcliffe, Samuel Sprague, and John Addy. They saw it as Tractarianism gone mad, since the Prayer Book provided for lay baptism. Rozier told the candidates to answer “No” to the question as to whether they were previously baptized, since it was not performed by “an ordained minister sent by the bishop.” Stephen Olive Pack, at Lamaline, the probable writer of a letter to the Public Ledger, charged that Rozier had done the rebaptizing “for the mere purpose of throwing contempt on the religious service of the Wesleyan ministers, and denying them a right which is conceded to a midwife or a fisherman.” Not only that, Rozier was also preaching the necessity of auricular confession. Pack repeated the charges to the colonial secretary on the very day of Bishop Feild’s visit to Lamaline.36 It was obvious Rozier had dipped deeply into Theophilous Anglicanus and other books of the new Tractarian teaching at Feild’s Theological Institution and elevated not just the sacrament, but himself along with it. Edmund Botterell, the Methodist superintendent, worked himself into a state of righteous indignation at St John’s and seconded everything that Pack had said about the “ungodly and unholy outrage” committed at Lamaline. But he went further. Appealing to the general Protestant ecumenism of the day, he called for all evangelical Protestants to speak out, since what Rozier had done meant that Tractarians would not recognize their baptisms either. He appealed to evangelical Anglicans who felt “indignation … because of this impious act” to speak against it. The event got even more press when Pack’s letter was picked up later by the Courier and then reprinted in the first Collett pamphlet and noted again in his second.37 But how many Anglicans at Lamaline were offended by Rozier’s actions? Pack reported in October 1851 that “a part” of the congregation had left the church and did not intend to return while Rozier was still the minister. Were these Methodists instead of evangelical Anglicans? Pack also noted that a large number of fishermen, most of whom were Methodist, fished out of Lamaline in the summer and had attended the Church of England. However, since Rozier arrived, he had given Methodists “a series of bigotted and illiberal attacks … from the pulpit,” and as a result they quit attending, and instead “spend their Sundays either in walking about or in their boats.” A large portion of these fishermen were from Grand Bank, and they brought back the news of Rozier’s attitude toward Methodists, and as a result many people in Fortune Bay were “very indignant and cry shame.”38 Yet the censuses do not show disaffection from the Church of England due to Rozier – in 1857 there were three lonely Methodists in Lamaline and over a decade later only four.39 When Feild stood on the deck of the Hawk in September 1855, his heart must have leapt up when he beheld the new church on the level green field

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– “the stately and beautiful Church” – which he came to consecrate “St Mary the Virgin.” Perhaps thinking of the bad press that Rozier had received in the St John’s papers, he wrote in his diary for publication that the reason for this happy day was “the Rev. Mr Rozier by whose zealous labours the Church of this settlement has been in every sense built up.” He had earlier marvelled that the timber came from a “special opportunity” provided by wrecking. The destruction of a large vessel nearby “brought balk and threeinch studs to their very doors.”40 The providential turn helped further another triumph of Tractarianism and Gothicism, and to Feild the church designed by his architect William Hay was “beautiful.” He must have felt pleased that in another community his vision of Anglicanism had materialized as he had imagined it. Lamaline’s next priest, Alfred Gabriel, was Rozier’s equal in Tractarianism, but like him, he too hit a bump in the road. He had to face a Methodist faction who thought they were “leaders and rulers of the place” who challenged “the Church Catholic.” Revealingly he stated that the faction in Lamaline was “a good example of the evil of the voluntary system,” in that it allowed people to withdraw their support in any matter that “does not suit their own view.” So his complaint was against what many Protestants saw was their freedom, their right to choose what they would stand for and what they would stand against. This was a recurring issue with the program of Bishop Feild, whether it was the freedom to financially support a particular minister, to contribute to a cause, or to speak extempore in church. It was the bishop’s authority versus popular power. In this particular case, Gabriel was able to stand his ground and maintain his hegemony against what he called “religious fanatics, rejoicing in excitement and religious intoxication and belying the good intentions of their founder by their proselytizing zeal.”41 Gabriel was probably referring more to what he heard was happening in Burin than in Lamaline in speaking of “excitement and religious intoxication,” for in addition to the perceived philandering of Gathercole, and Feild’s misguided decision to place Rozier there, the presence of Methodist revivals was a third dynamic that caused a steep decline in Anglicanism at Burin. People chose the ecstasy of Methodism over the solemnity of Tractarianism. In both it was a matter of feeling, and the majority of the people rejected the latter. People chose ecstasy over awe, the presence over the shadow. They chose the immanence of personal joy over being lost in veneration before the transcendent. Several waves of rapture in Burin swept them away. The first occurred in the fall of 1849, not from the preaching of the local Methodist missionary but from the shared testimony of fishermen from Grand Bank who in their

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migratory pursuits regularly fished in the fall at Great Burin on Burin Island. They sailed into the harbour fresh from a Grand Bank revival: “While their boats were moored at Great Burin, they held prayer meetings every night. God poured His Spirit upon the supplicants, and there was a great cry among sinners. The whole circuit now seemed in a flame! Every little fishing settlement awoke up to inquire after God. In every instance it was hard to distinguish between the cries of penitents in distress and the shouts of joy from believers. ‘The cloud covered the tabernacle,’ and ‘the glory of the Lord was revealed’!” The people then solidified the success of the revival by forming three class meetings at Great Burin and one at Foote’s Cove on Pardy’s Island and at Spoon Cove (Epworth).42 In 1863 Rozier, who, according to Bishop Feild, was “not popular” in Burin, had to face a tsunami of a revival when John Pike, a teacher and local preacher from Flat Islands, Placentia Bay, joined the Methodist missionary John S. Phinney for New Year’s services. There was such “Divine Power in an unusual manner” that the people “melted before the word like wax before the fire.” Special services continued for six to eight weeks, and often there were “as many as sixty and seventy of a night, at the communion rail, and in the aisles of the church, kneeling before God, begging for mercy.” Phinney, a man familiar with revivals, never saw anything like it.43 When it was all over there were 200 converts, and 250 more “decided to consecrate their services to the Lord.” The only equipment that Rozier had to fight against this movement was Feild’s arsenal of altar, chancel, spire, and liturgy, preferably intoned. But the wave of ecstasy washed over many, and instead of kneeling and bowing there was shouting, embracing, and dancing in Burin.

harbour breton, fortune bay, and hermitage bay While the Church of England spoke of Burin as “long neglected,” it was, in fact, just one of many possible missions on a “greatly and deplorably neglected” coast. There had been some promise on the south coast quite early on with John Harris and John Evans, two successive spg missionaries stationed at Placentia (1788–98), who clearly saw their mission – as Bishop Fleming later in the 1830s told his missionary at Burin – to “go west as far as you like, or as far as you may be able.”44 They did just that, instead of staying at Placentia, or even Placentia Bay.45 But we don’t know how far west they ventured. Wix was told in 1835 that both Harris and Evans had visited Belleoram, and five years earlier Wix noted that Mrs King recalled “several visits” of Harris when she lived at Fortune, and a visit of John Evans to

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Pushthrough after she moved there, one of three he made to that community.46 While both Harris and Evans visited Fortune Bay, and likely Hermitage Bay and Bay d’Espoir, it is not known if they ventured west of Cape La Hune. Regardless, this was an early and promising start for the Church of England on the south coast – one that was then abandoned for decades. In 1824 it looked as if a tentative beginning was about to be made when Charles Blackman, spg missionary at Ferryland, volunteered to visit “the southern and western shores of the island” to discover who was there and what relationship they had with the Church of England. However, after spending two months in Placentia Bay during the following year, “the season was far advanced” and Blackman did not even make it to Fortune Bay.47 Neither did Bishop Inglis peer beyond the Burin Peninsula during his visit to Newfoundland in 1827. This was the first ever “visitation” of the bishop of Nova Scotia since the episcopal seat was created in 1787, and he made it then only with a little help from the state. It was not exactly “beating swords into ploughshares,” but Inglis brought the gospel of Christ to the people of the northeast coast in the man-of-war hms Orestes, with its eighteen guns, and to the south coast in hms Alligator, with twenty-eight guns, with the crews of the British navy presumably at his disposal. Governor Cochrane had arranged for the bishop to visit Placentia Bay by having him cross the isthmus from Trinity Bay to meet him in his yacht. But Inglis declined the offer, and it was only “reluctantly” that he agreed at the insistence of the governor to visit the south coast, and only as far as Burin, after his return from the northern settlements to St John’s.48 It was not long after Bishop Inglis that the windows were opened on the south coast for the Church of England when William Bullock circumnav-

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igated the island with the governor in 1829, and two more clergymen made two separate visits in 1830. Bullock, at the request of Cochrane, arrived on the south coast in hms Tyne, with twenty-eight guns again, preaching “the blessed sounds of salvation,” but this time in some places where it “had never been heard.” While advocating for a clergyman to the westward, he also felt that Fortune and Hermitage Bays, where he spent more time, were “extremely desirous” of a Church of England clergyman. He noted that the governor was gathering information on the settlements but suggested that a clergyman be sent in the spring to determine, tellingly, where all the outports actually were and “to prepare the people for the reception of a missionary.”49 Archdeacon Coster followed his advice and arranged for the new missionary, James Robertson, to visit the south coast in the middle of June 1830. At first Robertson did not utilize the services of the governor or the British navy, as did former clergy, but instead went straight to Harbour Breton and carried out his reconnaissance under the auspices of the merchants Newman and Co. During the first two weeks he travelled in Newman’s boats east to Belleoram and west to such places as Gaultois, Hermitage, and Furby’s Cove in Hermitage Bay, noting such information as the number of merchant servants, women fishing as well as men, and religious preferences. He did not visit, but obtained the names and population of many smaller outports in Hermitage Bay from Mr Creed, the Newman agent at Gaultois. Then hms Manly, a British “brig of war,” came into Harbour Breton “bound to the westward,” and Robertson, hardly believing his good luck, decided to travel on it. That was a mistake. No doubt it was fine sailing, but the manof-war stopped in only at Piccaire, Penguin Islands, and then headed straight to Port aux Basques, bypassing all the settlements on the way. After a stay of three days, the Manly headed straight to Lawn, where Robertson disembarked and visited on the Burin Peninsula for three weeks. He then returned to Harbour Breton and after waiting over three weeks, was able to board a vessel going to Pictou in Nova Scotia. About a week later he met the bishop at Windsor, gave him his report, and received a posting to Bridgetown and Wilmot, Nova Scotia. The immediate and concrete items he was able to reference from his trip were the offer of Newman and Co. to build a church at Harbour Breton with one proviso – “that it shall be erected on a particular spot which they mention near their own establishment” – and a subscription to build a church at Hermitage under the supervision of Newman’s agent at Gaultois.50 It is noteworthy that Robertson did not mention any Methodists on the south coast except at Grand Bank and Fortune, where he found that “most of the inhabitants seem to be deeply imbued with the peculiar tenets of

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that sect.” Ever since Richard Knight was stationed at Grand Bank in 1816, Methodist missionaries had been sailing west in Fortune Bay to such places as Harbour Breton and Jersey Harbour, and even to Hermitage Bay, in compliance with the local Missionary Committee’s view that his mission was not only Grand Bank and Fortune but all Fortune Bay. Both George Ellidge and Simeon Noall visited Hermitage, for example, and John Haigh sent religious tracts along the “Western Shore, to Ramea, Burgeo, and even as far as Cape Ray.”51 George Ellidge estimated in 1830 that from Point May west along the whole south coast for “more than 150 miles there was no Protestant religious Instruction but what was given by the Wesleyan Missionary.”52 While it is largely accurate to say that Methodists alone had been sending missionaries to the south coast since 1816, Ellidge was overstating the work of the paid missionary. He did not have the earlier insight of William Wilson that the real missionaries of Methodism were the fishermen from Grand Bank and Fortune during their migratory pursuits, who were fishing not just in Fortune Bay but to the west as far as Cape Ray: The great cruising which our friends have in this part of the Island after fish, which is 40 or 50, and frequently 70 or 80 leagues, and their long absence from the means of grace in consequence, is certainly detrimental to their progress in knowledge and holiness. But though their long absence is to be regretted, yet I believe they do most conscientiously make the best use of their time they possibly can. As two or three boats generally cruise together whenever it is practicable, on a Sabbath Day our friends assemble together; and hold their regular meetings in their boats, and sometimes hold prayer meetings ashore, and distribute tracts amongst the inhabitants. And thus almost every private member in the Grand Bank Society does in a certain sense become a missionary. For by their meetings and distribution of tracts, a degree of light is diffused through various harbours, where no minister of any denomination was ever seen.53 As a result of this migratory fishery from Grand Bank and Fortune, a number of Methodists remained and settled as far west as Burgeo, Petites, and Port aux Basques; for example, three families moved from Fortune Bay to Cornelius Island (Upper Burgeo) in 1830. Likely these were Methodists from Grand Bank or Fortune. At the decade-old settlement of Burnt Islands, Feild observed in 1849 that “the Englishmen were generally from Dorsetshire, and the Newfoundlanders from Fortune Bay.”54 Because of the work of migratory fishermen as missionaries, on at least one occasion a family moved east, instead of west. In 1822 a crew of Grand Bank fisher-

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men went into Francois and held a prayer meeting in one of the three houses in the community. The father experienced such spiritual thirst as a result that “he determined as soon as possible to leave the place where he then resided that he might sit under the sound of a preached Gospel. Last fall he accomplished his purpose and came to Fortune. His children are now receiving instruction in the school, himself and his wife are steady members of our society, and I believe are both earnestly seeking the salvation of their souls.”55 Spirituality, instead of fish, was the motivation of their geographic mobility, all occasioned by the popular religion of their fellow fishermen. In Wix’s and Robertson’s accounts of the south and west coast they were not alarmed about the state of morality or religion. Yes, people did prefer the services of a clergyman, but they appeared devout, and certainly civilized, without him. The people at Pushthrough, having not seen a Church of England clergyman in decades, were sorrowful that Robertson had not visited them in the summer, but were elated when one visited them in the fall. As at Burgeo Islands, people in several places had a voluntary local lay reader hold services on Sunday, such as Charles Vincent in Bay St George, John Hardy of Poole at Richard’s Harbour, another at Belleoram, and James Miles “at the very bottom” of Fortune Bay, in Newfoundland for fifty-six years who “reads on Sundays to the surrounding families.” At Bay de Este a lay reader, originally from Sturminster, Dorset, told Wix, “I have often dropped tears on Sunday … to think of the church at home, which I thought too little of when I was there.”56 These experiences accord with that of Governor Cochrane who in 1827 “felt almost humiliated” by the stellar example of two families in White Bear Bay. By their morality and spirituality they outshone many who “style themselves their betters.” Here they were, totally without surveillance, praying family prayers each night and holding the church service morning and evening on Sunday. One of the women had taught the rest to read, and it was she who led the service. Cochrane was so struck that they lived this way “never having even seen a Minister” that he could not write enough about them: “I confess these poor people have humbled me in my own eyes and shewn an example which I shall do well to follow.”57 The Methodist and Church of England clergy in Fortune Bay were competitors but were civil and polite to each other, and on occasion enjoyed each other’s company, even though the Methodists had the bay to themselves for over a decade. When the Methodist missionary Richard Shepherd arrived at Jersey Harbour across Fortune Bay from Grand Bank, he was surprised to find that three days before, James Robertson, sent out by former archdeacon Coster, had come to Harbour Breton across the arm with in-

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tentions to build a church there. He decided not to join him but to attend to less prominent places in the bay.58 It was not coincidental that Shepherd came to Jersey Harbour first, for the Methodists had a closer relationship with Nicolle & Co. than with the Newman merchants and their agent in Harbour Breton, perhaps because Methodism was popular in Jersey and had a Newfoundland connection, being introduced there by Pierre Le Seur and Jean Tentin, who were converted through the preaching of Laurence Coughlan in Conception Bay.59 When Richard Knight visited over a decade before Shepherd, he noted that Nicolle’s agent, John Anthoine, and his wife “consider themselves belonging to us.” As a matter of fact, Anthoine was a member of the Methodist Society back in Jersey, and his brother talked of requesting the Nicolle firm to build a church in Jersey Harbour.60 This did not at all mean that he was antagonistic toward the Church of England. The day after Shepherd’s visit, John Robertson came across from Harbour Breton and planned an afternoon Sunday service to which a greater crowd attended than in the morning at Newman’s.61 A decade later the Methodist missionary William Marshall was received with open arms by all three agents in the area, John Ellis at Newman’s, William and Grace Gallop at Gaultois, and John Chapman at Jersey Harbour. Each of them “fitted up” sail rooms and stores on their premises to provide a place for him to preach. Both Ellis and Gallop even had him baptize their sons, and he spent Christmas Day with Gallop and his family “in reading and singing and prayer.” One of the clerks, probably Church of England, in the office at Newman’s had begun to read prayers on Sunday, and yet Marshall said his “heart rejoiced” when he heard about it. And his fellow missionary, John Peach, in 1842 was “kindly received” by Ellis and Gallop and especially noted that on 11 October 1842 he was “in company with Mr John Ellis, a fine time.” Similarly in November Gallop came over to Harbour Breton from Gaultois, and they “spent the evening in singing and music. Brother Ingham played the Bass, and Mr Ellis the flute. A very pleasant evening.” They then crossed to Jersey Harbour where Ingham preached in Chapman’s parlour.62 But not only that, even the Methodist Marshall and Thomas Boone, the first resident Church of England clergyman, fellowshipped together, with Newman’s agent having dinner, with the implied atmosphere of kindness all around. A few months later Marshall was still recording pleasant days as he experienced the camaraderie of an exile elite of clergymen, mercantile agents, and the magistrate: “Left Gaultois for Harbour Briton and Jersey Harbor. Had a beautiful time across the Bays. Kindly received by all friends. Took tea at Mr Gaden’s in company with the Rev. Mr Boone.”63 It was not all about class or about finding solace with one another while posted on the frontier in Harbour Breton. Rather they

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shared the compatibility of a common Protestantism, in this instance, its Low Anglican and Methodist variety. All shared the sentiment that the focus of Christianity was the same as that preached by Thomas Wood, whom Wix sent back to visit Fortune Bay after his 1835 tour, namely, “the mercies of Redeeming love, and the willingness of the Saviour to receive all who repent of their sins and turn unto Him.”64 This did not mean that there was no competition among the clergy. Each was emotionally and notionally tied to his particular nuance of Protestantism and strived for it to preponderate. For instance Boone reported to Archdeacon Bridge his anxiety about the Methodists having the upper hand in Hermitage Bay, where a Methodist missionary stationed at Hermitage regularly visited all the places around the bay. Moreover the people were supplied through Gaultois and therefore did not come to Harbour Breton, so he had no opportunity to influence them. He despaired, “I fear Hermitage Bay is lost to the Church.” Moreover, things were worrisome even in Harbour Breton and Jersey Harbour, and westward toward Port aux Basques, because so many were becoming “attached” to William Marshall.65 Bishop Spencer, who had appointed Boone to Harbour Breton, made plans to strengthen the Church of England presence in Fortune and Hermitage Bays by enlisting the aid of two nss teachers who were sent to Grole and Belleoram as lay readers and quasi-clergy.66 The effect was almost immediate. John S. Peach, the Methodist missionary who replaced Marshall, visited Grole and saw that the smile of welcome, once so open and comforting, was now so disappointingly constrained. First of all he was being edged out of his bed, for now John Marshall, the nss teacher and lay reader, slept in it, though he willingly shared it. His sleeping arrangements were a sign of the shift that had now taken place in Grole, for when he tried to “raise a congregation to preach to” the next day, he failed. After getting no one to come to hear him, he could not find anyone to bring him back where he came from.67 Peach probably misinterpreted the drawing back of the people of Grole from his ministry. Likely that they did so because, not particular as Protestants, they now had the services of one who was, if not a clergyman, certainly as good as one, and maybe even better. He would never be absent and thus could lay read every Sunday and be on hand to baptize, marry, and bury when necessary. Instead of seeing himself as simply redundant, Peach understood that his Grole experience of being slighted was just one indication of a contrary wind beginning to blow against Methodism in Fortune and Hermitage Bays. He sensed that clergy recently ordained by Bishop Spencer had an inflated sense of their new status, viewing themselves as “Successors of the Apostles with the cry of the Church, the Church, the true Church are

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we” upon their lips. In his discouragement that the incline up an already steep hill was now made even more so, he likely overstated the task before him and his fellow Methodist missionaries in saying, “I am very much afraid that two thirds of the clergy in Newfoundland are in real principle Puseyites.” But it was the fisherman who carried Peach in his boat to Grole who shocked him by having “the impudence to tell me to my face that my ordination was not valid, seeing that it was not performed by a Bishop.”68 Where did this new Tractarian wind blow from in Fortune Bay? It is unlikely that it came from the cordial Thomas Boone in Harbour Breton or from the new nss schoolmaster at Grole. The probable source was the annual immigration to Newfoundland from England of over 200 “youngsters” or servants to the Newman’s premises at Harbour Breton and Gaultois. After an indenture of eighteen months they were free to return home or stay and fish independently. Some of them had acquired a Tractarian view of the Church of England, its sacraments and clergy, since the movement had been spreading for nearly a decade at home in England before they emigrated. “Not a few” of these actually “take it upon themselves to inform the people that there are no regular ministers but Clergymen of the Establishment.” In addition, some of the clerks, possibly new arrivals also, were “poisoning the minds of the people.”69 Matters went from bad to worse for the Methodists. Peach was abruptly recalled in the late fall of 1842 and not replaced. He felt that it was a strategic error by the Methodists because it would result in all of his and William Marshall’s “labour and toil” being in vain. All their preaching and visiting had only “prepared the way” for the bishop’s schoolmaster. At Hermitage the people themselves were shocked, disappointed, and upset at Peach’s removal. “One Gentleman says ‘I think it very strange.’ Another of our friends, ‘It seems very queer.’”70 Stalwart Methodists could now look forward only to the rare and ephemeral visits of the missionary from Grand Bank, as in days past. Then, about two years later the nss transferred John Marshall, “a sensible and pious, painstaking man,” from Grole to Hermitage as a resident missionary in the capacity of teacher and lay reader.71 He could teach all winter, unlike at Grole, where seasonally “not one family” was left in the harbour and he had to follow his students into the woods and visit them from tilt to tilt, just as the Methodist missionary William Wilson had done in Burin.72 Hermitage had a wood supply close by, and during the winter of 1841 its people had built “the shell of a New Wesleyan Chapel” that was now waiting for Marshall. It was soon “made over to the Church.”73 Peach had seen it coming. But how Methodist were the people of Hermitage, anyway? Being Protestant, they were willing to negotiate their way through what many may have

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regarded as minute distinctions between the evangelical Methodist preacher and the evangelical nss teacher and lay reader, especially since the Methodist messenger abruptly left them, and the nss one held promise of staying. Moreover, the nss teacher, contrary to the wishes of the Anglican hierarchy, was also “an extempore expounder of Scripture and a conductor of prayer meetings.”74 While the gospel preached was quite similar, the main distinction was the degree of emotion that Methodists looked for in the repentance before and the salvation after. For instance, William Marshall noted on one occasion of his preaching at Hermitage, “A very powerful influence attended the word. Many felt and some wept.”75 Singularly important to the Methodist preacher, this sign of reception would have less significance to the Low Anglican nss teacher, and probably to the people of Hermitage. They embraced both forms of Protestantism, even while William Marshall was stationed in Hermitage Bay, for when he was away travelling to other parts of the bay and along the south coast, which was often, a person would “conduct” the service on Sunday.76 It is likely that if this person was Church of England, it was a “reading” that took place at the service, both of the service and of a published sermon. Some lay readers did engage in “comment” or extemporary preaching, as did Henry Forrest in Bay St George, but Archdeacon Wix and the Anglican hierarchy forbade it. They supplied books of sermons to allow no excuse for it and to ensure that the sermons read were written by Church of England clergy only.77 If the lay reader was a Methodist, as at Pushthrough, extempore praying and preaching likely accompanied the reading. He would still have mostly read the service, both the prayers and the sermon, but would also likely add his own prayers and would add “few words extempore, to make them … understand the meaning of what was read,” as John Hoskins did at Old Perlican before being advised by Arthur Thomey to forget reading the sermon altogether and preach extempore.78 Since the Protestants of Fortune and Hermitage Bays were used to hearing services read and sermons variously read and preached extemporaneously by both Anglican and Methodist teachers and preachers, there was not a large jump from one to the other – certainly nothing to get worked up over, though a few did around the island. For example, Robert Jarvis in John de Bay, Placentia Bay, vowed never to go to a Methodist service, because they “did not read all his prayers and a church minister would.” He noticed that the morning and evening prayers in the Sunday Service of the Methodists left out a number of the prayers in the Book of Common Prayer. Therefore, he would have nothing to do with the former.79

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People in Hermitage Bay demonstrated a spiritual interest, for they avidly attended the services of missionaries of either stripe. Neither did the missionaries report instances of Wix’s “horrible enormities.” There were just three complaints. People swore a lot. The Methodist missionary was shocked when he visited in Hermitage in 1826: “Even the women will swear like troopers … I went into a house where a woman was cursing her own son as zealously as Shimei cursed David.” The child replied in kind. Yet she and most of the residents attended his service that evening. That highlights a second complaint. They did not respond to the missionary’s call to salvation as he wished they would. As a matter of fact, Simeon Noall said that his experience of preaching “repentance and faith” in Hermitage was like “like ploughing upon a rock.” The following year when Noall visited again, we hear a third refrain: not keeping the Sabbath as the missionaries envisioned it should be kept. It appears that though it was the first of July, the height of the season, the residents were not fishing, which they would call “work,” but instead were doing the sundry things that had to be done relating to it: “Some were attending their nets on the water; some putting them out to dry; some bailing their boats. Some were at one thing, and some at another.” Furthermore, when they realized he was having a second service that they could actually attend, Noall was quite happy to see them “flocking to the place” to hear him speak. He “exhorted them to look to Christ for salvation.”80 Interestingly, during the missionary visits of the 1820s and 1830s, and the throughout the tenure of Peach and the two Marshalls, there is not a single reference to drunkenness at Hermitage. The absence speaks loudly against the alarm over it as one of “the crying sins of this country” in the missionary literature, which led “to the violation of all social order, and to the destruction of every religious principle” – no doubt seen as a large reason for missionaries.81 It appears that drunkenness was localized and limited to particular occasions, such as at Grole and Muddy Hole at the arrival of a “floating grog shop,” and often in the fall, the time for squaring up with the merchant and for weddings. When William Marshall arrived at Grole on Tuesday, 6 August 1839, he estimated that “at least half” of the people were drunk. He did not state what the occasion was, but it may have been that a trader had arrived in the harbour with liquor on board. Three years later, again in mid-summer, John Peach entered Grole and found “some very dissipated characters.” He did not say how extensive the drinking was, but his attention was especially drawn to one of them who was “as wild as a ‘march hare.’” Drunkenness was certainly extensive to the west at Muddy Hole on Wix’s visit in 1835. Again, “a floating

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grog-shop, under the name of a ‘trading vessel’” had arrived the previous week and all had been satiated, so much so, said Wix, probably overstating the situation, that they probably “had not a stick to burn, or a fish for the kettle.”82 Weddings, especially, were a time of drunkenness, and sometimes fighting. When William Marshall visited Muddy Hole in October 1839, he was taken aback by the men drinking and fighting at the wedding of James Riddet and Sarah Wills. Even one of his rowers joined the party, and maybe the fray, and he had to leave him drunk in Muddy Hole. In one September he conducted eight marriages as far west as Mosquito and especially noted “drunkenness” and being “grieved” at three of them.83 Methodist missionaries had a difficult time, although they profited from fees, as they went about the coast in September and October, during the the time for marrying when families had ended the fishing season and not yet gone to their winter houses. The missionaries believed in matrimony but did not at all take to the Cana-like exuberance that accompanied the weddings, believing it was sin. For example, Peach “spent a very unpleasant day” in Samitches (Sam Hitches Harbour, Long Island Harbour) because after he married a couple, there was “nothing heard of or thought about but myrth, dancing, and singing the whole day.” The men and women had worked hard all summer and now were enjoying a time of communal happiness, but instead of joining them, Peach moped about, single and alone. Yet this was the residence of William Strickland, a devout Church of England fisherman, who migrated there from Deer Island, White Bear Bay, where, according to Wix, he and his brother took the initiative “in reading prayers to their own and the neighbours’ families on the Lord’s day,” although they “never saw a church, or were where a church was.” He likely did the same at Samitches in summer, where Wix received his hospitality and preached, and at the “bottom of the bay” in winter where the Methodist missionary William Marshall visited and preached and exclaimed, “I cannot describe the joy which the people manifested to see me.” Peach’s reaction to high spirits thus illustrates a cultural nuance separating Methodist and Anglican Protestantism that was more similar than dissimilar in its mode of worship, call for conversion, and propositional claims regarding Christianity.84 It was precisely this Protestant ecumenism that Bishop Feild intended to split on his first trip to the south coast in 1845. Arriving at Harbour Breton, not on hms Orestes or the Alligator of the British navy as Bishop Inglis before him, but with his private episcopal man-of-war, the fifty-six-ton Hawk. And putting on his episcopal robes and mitre, Feild fired a loud signal that echoed off the cliffs of Harbour Breton and beyond to everyone, proclaiming an exclusive Anglicanism, asserting its superiority to all, and society with none. The echo was heard across Fortune Bay at least as far as Grand Bank,

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where the Methodist missionary, Adam Nightingale, was warned that the Church of England was “the Apostles’ Church, and that men legally ordained by an Episcopal Bishop are the only ministers qualified to preach the Gospel and administer the Holy sacraments, and consequently all other churches and ministers were not scriptural.” Feild called on the people “to bring their children to be baptized, who had not been baptized by Episcopal Clergyman.” He then rebaptized several children who had been baptized by Methodist missionaries. The previous representative of the Anglican hierarchy, Archdeacon Wix, had acted similarly a decade earlier. Before Wix had finished his tour in Bay St George, Ingham Sutcliffe, the Methodist missionary at Grand Bank, stated that in Fortune and Hermitage Bays Wix rebaptized those who had “previously been baptized by the Methodist ministers, and whose names were properly registered in the book kept in this place.” Furthermore, without giving specifics, he charged Wix with having “endeavoured to lessen our influence and usefulness in more ways than the above.” Earlier, John Pickavant, the Methodist chairman, wrote that they “had to contend with strong opposition” from the newly minted archdeacon, and three years later called him “a bitter enemy of Methodism.” But he rebaptized with much less rhetoric. Wix at least publicly, even though disingenuously, affirmed Methodists in his appeal to a broad Protestantism, noting in his Journal, for example, that he bypassed Burin and Fortune because there were “very worthy Wesleyan Missionaries in these districts.”85 In contrast, Feild made a theological frontal assault on Methodism, declaring it to be “an unreal church” that was propped up by the mere “pretensions” of its claimants.86 His stand against Methodism was like that towards voluntary societies – they were “self-formed” and therefore had “no foundation.” He called upon his clergy to speak out against “such inventions of men.”87 Sailing about on the Hawk, he saw it as his mission to enlighten any inclined to Methodism, rescue them from their delusion, and place them under the proper pointed arches of Gothic Anglicanism. But apart from firing a warning shot, Feild was not able to do much at Harbour Breton. His journal reveals his total focus on sacramental Christianity with not a word about a sermon or preaching – the focus of Protestantism. Then, after the sacramental flurry, he was gone, not to return for three years. He felt it keenly that all he had accomplished was an episcopal flourish. Before he left, he concluded that a clergyman must be stationed at Harbour Breton and promised John Ellis, Newman’s agent, that the next one available would come his way. He lamented that “along 200 miles of thickly (for Newfoundland) inhabited coast – Placentia and Fortune Bays” all he had was a “shadow of a clergyman” in the person of William Jeynes, a deacon, and he was about to depart for England. Realiz-

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ing clearly the importance of clergymen strategically placed, he vented his frustration to Ernest Hawkins, the spg secretary: “If the Church of England cannot send out Missionaries … between Popery and Methodism we either crumble to nothing or are crushed.”88 For two more years the people of Fortune and Hermitage Bays did as they always had done – received the visits of Methodist missionaries, attended the services of lay readers in their houses, and privately offered their prayers. In this way they attended to their spiritual needs and probably did not see the same urgency as the bishop, with his extreme sacramental views totally dependent on clergy for their delivery. Feild complained he could not obtain real clergymen, meaning university graduates from England; all he could come up with were “schoolmasters, a chemist, a brewer’s clerk, and a post office worker” whom he had to train at his Theological Institution.89 He did obtain a real missionary for Harbour Breton in 1847 – Jacob George Mountain, an Oxford graduate, and a fellow Tractarian.90 Actually Feild wanted to make him principal of his Theological Institution at St John’s, but like William Grey, who retreated to Portugal Cove, Mountain wanted to serve Christ in a more remote place in a life of self-denial. As an ascetic he believed that “the soft and epicurean doctrine of the present day, of sparing the body, is utterly contrary to the Gospel.” He did not believe that the “the trials and chastisements” of life were sufficient for cultivating the spiritual life, “without adding our own.” Thus he wanted to minister in “some hard and secluded sphere among the poor.” Even Harbour Breton had too much hustle and bustle for him. In addition to fishermen, it had 200 men, mostly unmarried, living and working on “the rooms” at Newman’s – “tradesmen such as carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths” and “men of a lower grade, who are employed on the wharfs and in the stores.” He did not particularly enjoy ministering to them. They were straight from England and already knew “the nature of the Church,” and they weren’t that bad at the beginning and weren’t much better at the end. He much preferred visiting and holding services in the homes in the smaller outports of Fortune Bay and as far west as Cape La Hune.91 Mountain was a Tractarian with a difference. He did not pine for the large canvas that Tractarian bishops painted with their great Gothic cathedrals, pageantry, and processions. He was singularly indifferent to Gothic architecture as a vessel to mediate spirituality. He later reflected on his visits, “Those humble communions in their low-roofed house, with deal table, and benches for the rail, have as sweet a savour in my remembrance as many in the holy and consecrated shrines of dear and happy England.” Yet the people of the south coast gave him one great frustration – not their morality or lack of it, but their inability or unwillingness to elevate the office of

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clergyman to that of a priest dispensing grace singularly through the sacrament. Most were reluctant to accept that the way to “receive the truth as it is in Jesus” was “by His Church on earth and … the Sacraments.” Mountain felt that it was “entirely unknown and unappreciated by the great majority” that he as a priest could offer “the life-giving power of the Sacraments to unite the sons of men to the Son of God.” Instead, for baptism, for instance, there was “the rooted idea” that “any one who could read” could perform the ordinance. When he “remonstrated” against lay baptism, “even up to the last year” of his mission, he would get the same reply: “‘Why, sir, the man was a fine scholar; he read the service as well as any parson!’” What do we make of this? Mountain met pockets of Methodism and evangelical Anglicanism along the coast. He did confess that he encountered “real religious feeling” and that their focus in religion was on receiving grace through hearing the Word preached or read. On several occasions the whole community was “full of piety and devotion.” At one place he admits that it was the Methodists who were responsible for this spirituality: “A few passing visits from Methodist teachers were the only other advantages of this kind which they had ever enjoyed; yet I have seldom witnessed a congregation so orderly, and who joined in the service with such devotion and earnestness.” He possibly overlooked that some of them were migratory Methodists from Grand Bank or Fortune, or even Burin. That they were Methodist would also explain their confidence that in their eyes Mountain was off the mark in his view of his ministry. He noted, for example, that though the people were “kind and warmhearted,” they were too independently minded to follow his counsel, and that between Pushthrough and Cape La Hune he encountered “too many tokens of indifference and dislike, barely concealed by the habitual self-possession of the people.” Thus they confidently rejected Mountain’s Tractarian view of himself as “a priest of God.” As Protestants, they saw clergy as preachers of the gospel who invite to receive Christ through the Word of God, and rejected Mountain’s admonition that “if you would come unto Christ, you must enter in by the way of his holy Sacraments.”92 Therefore, instead of meeting immorality and total ignorance of God, the first Anglican clergyman “in full orders” in Fortune Bay encountered a divergent Christianity already well cultivated before his arrival. The south coast was a place of diversity that did not lend itself to the uniformity of Tractarianism. For example, at English Harbour West, Mountain even encountered an agent of a Halifax merchant who was a Baptist, named Hall, who was setting “a very bad example” by teaching students at a Sunday school “chiefly reading and writing.” Mountain told him that doing such was breaking the Sabbath. He told the parents to stop sending their

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children to him, but Hall protested that he was not teaching any “peculiar doctrines.” Mountain replied that he objected on both accounts “either to his teaching his views of religion, or to a mere secular education on the Lord’s day.”93 It is telling that as a Church of England clergyman he felt entitled to demand such of both the teacher and the parents. After a decade of ministry, many began to submit to the Church of England, its clergy and schoolmasters. Harbour Breton, Hermitage, and Belleoram became centres of Anglicanism exerting an ecclesiastical hegemony in the region. John Ellis at Harbour Breton provided everything to the clergyman – music, friendship, counsel, “every hospitality and kindness,” and served as churchwarden. The people must have found it difficult to distinguish a dividing line between the mercantile and the spiritual. The church was next to the Newman property, its agent was the organist, the parsonage was a Newman’s rental.94 Newman’s also controlled government services. One who did not fit well into this symbiotic oligarchy of the Newmans and the Church of England at Harbour Breton was Philip Tocque, stationed there in the late 1840s as a clerk of the peace. Tocque – an avowed Wesleyan, who grew of age in the cosmopolitan era of Carbonear and Harbour Grace discussing the latest published books with Philip Henry Gosse and William Charles St John in the Carbonear book club, and was the first native Newfoundlander to publish a book – felt keenly the constrictive monopoly that prevailed at Harbour Breton. He communicated his alarm to James Crowdy, the colonial secretary, that Newman’s and their workers were the road commissioners, except one, the constable, the bailiff and jailer, the assayer of weights and measures, and the surveyor of lumber. They controlled the Board of Education, the school was on their premises, and the teacher was the wife of the storekeeper. Moreover, both he and the magistrate lived in their houses. Stirred by this “anomalous state of affairs,” he wrote eloquently that it was “subversive of that independence of mind which every man ought to possess, and which invades and violates the sacred rights of conscience.”95 Tocque had at least one associate in his discontent, Thomas E. Gaden, magistrate, postmaster, and sub-collector, who was not Methodist but Church of England. After Tocque left, Gaden took a stand against the local clergyman, William Kepple White. Gaden stated that White had “made himself conspicuous as advocating the doctrine of the high Tractarian party,” and he objected to its “the forms and ceremonies” when White introduced them on his arrival to Harbour Breton. He also said that upon his arrival White found a pamphlet “in general circulation” that took him to task for his high-handed churchmanship in his previous mission, Harbour Buffett, Placentia Bay, and White charged Gaden with circulating it. The matter got

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7.3 Thomas Newman Hunt’s stone church at Hermitage

personal when White blamed him for a mix-up in his mail and threatened to report him. Gaden replied that he had done his duty and that he “did not care for him or the Bishop.”96 Gaden had also encountered friction with the Tractarian Jacob Mountain, White’s predecessor. Having a self-understanding that only marriages performed by an Anglican clergyman were valid, not those of the state, Mountain refused church rites to George Guy and Susannah Vallis, both Church of England members whom Gaden had married, unless “they got married over again.”97 Gaden told Crowdy that Anglicans in the district regarded this domineering refusal to church Susannah and baptize their child “as a great grievance.” Gaden and Tocque were two voices that represent those who refused to acquiesce in the ecclesiastical control that had moved in as the evening fog and enveloped the place. Through his clergy, Bishop Feild was attempting to place a grid of Tractarian uniformity upon not just Harbour Breton, but the surrounding area as well. Tocque wrote that Feild was going around Fortune Bay acting as if everyone from England was Church of England but objected that “the circumstance of their being English does not make them Episcopalians.” Many no doubt were, but others were Dissenters before immigrating, “and others never attended any place of worship at all” at home. Few were intensely denominational. A man named Evans, a member of the Church of England,

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took the 1845 census, and Evans told Tocque that “the greater part of the people could not tell him what sect they belonged to, he knew they were Protestants so he therefore put them down as Episcopalians.” Tocque went on to say that since the Church of England had a clergyman at Harbour Breton for only about seven years, while the Methodists had been ministering continually for thirty-two years, “if these people were anything,” they were Methodist, or “at least half” of them. But the census entered everyone as Church of England except for twelve Methodists at Pushthrough. The teacher there was a member of the Methodist Society but still was “compelled to teach the Church Catechism.” Thus both Methodists and Catholics were subjected to the catechism and “formularies” of the Church of England, which Tocque called attention to as “a gross infringement of their religious liberty.”98 John Marshall was a nss Church of England schoolmaster and lay reader at Grole and Hermitage, before moving to Belleoram, where he taught for over twenty years, but he offered a brand different from that of Feild and his Harbour Breton clergymen. He continued his “Scriptural, Protestant, and Evangelical” Anglicanism, which focused not on people receiving sacraments but on “preaching to them Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, to all who accept His freely offered salvation.”99 This was a sharp contrast to Mountain’s Tractarianism, which affirmed that “if you would come unto Christ, you must enter in by the way of his holy Sacraments.” On his first tour of the south coast, Bishop Feild admired Marshall’s work ethic and devotion, and, though he was a nss teacher, ordained him a deacon. Feild felt he had little leverage over even spg clergymen, because if he leaned on them theologically they might leave, and he had no one to replace them. He had even less over nss schoolmasters, because they were paid by and answered to their headquarters in England instead of to the local bishop. Besides, if Marshall did leave, the Methodists would move in and all would be lost, but with Marshall present, the people declined their offers.100 Still, over the years Feild refused to ordain him priest. Ministering in Belleoram until 1869, with his health failing, Marshall stayed faithful to his Protestant understanding of Anglicanism “to spread the knowledge of Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Appearing not to begrudge anyone or anything, in his final report he wrote that he celebrated “a grand day” with both Bishop Feild and his dean of Fortune Bay, William Kepple White, all three in their later years, celebrating Holy Communion in the Belleoram church. Without Marshall they would not have made it. On Saturday “it was blowing much too hard” and they were stuck in Lally Cove in White’s yacht, so Marshall got the largest schooner in port and with a crew brought the two stranded souls back to Belleoram to prepare for their episcopal Sunday.101

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The stellar integrity and ministry of Marshall was counterbalanced on the other side of the peninsula by building with stone. It was Thomas Newman Hunt of Newman, Hunt, and Co., who translated his vision of Anglicanism into Gothic stone, and he chose Hermitage to do it, possibly because of its romantic beauty, secluded from the hustle and bustle of Harbour Breton, not to speak of Gaultois, where the rendering of whale fat produced “a sort of perfume by no means refreshing.” Hermitage had neither. Seeing it for the first time in 1830, Wix exclaimed, “Hermitage Cove must strike every visitor by its picturesque beauty. It is in a valley between exceedingly high ridges of hill” – a perfect setting to make an architectural statement of Gothic Anglicanism, “the best in the island, with the exception of the Cathedral.”102 Just as Feild was the prime mover of his cathedral in St John’s, so this “great ornament” in Hermitage was the personal vision of one man, Thomas Newman Hunt, who spent a private fortune of over £8,000 to carry it out.103 One wonders if he ever meant St Saviour’s to be more than a monument, a work of art, etched on the landscape. No one in Newfoundland, let alone in Hermitage, had anything to do with it. Both the builders and the materials, “the stone, stonemasons, bricks, mortar, slate, and even every piece of timber,” were all brought from England.104 It was obvious to the fishermen and their families that this was somebody else’s project, and not theirs. They were not called on to contribute their expertise in building a structure compatible to an environment and climate they knew so well. And for all the spending, the builder overlooked a prime consideration of architecture in designing a structure: its serviceability to people. They actually viewed it as Newman’s just putting another weight upon their shoulders: if not an incubus, certainly an albatross. Edward Colley, a local clergyman, complained that all the people talked about was fish, and “even the Beautiful little Church, is, by many of them, looked upon more as a burden than a Blessing.” But surely it was. First of all, it was not finished at the time. It did not appear that the merchant had them foremost in his mind when, after all the outlay of cash, he had not yet provided for one of the most necessary things in a church, a place to sit. But the people improvised, for it was their way of life: “At present the congregation sit upon planks laid upon fish barrels.” They may have wondered if they had made any progress. They had gone from the shell of a Methodist church to the shell of a Church of England without seats or “fittings.”105 Second, as they looked up from their punts at the “gray pile,” while fishing throughout the winter to try to make ends meet at Newman’s, and thought of the time a fellow fisherman and his crew were “swallowed up in

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the ice … on a howling, wintry day, before the eyes of his shrieking wife and children,” they may have wondered whether such “a munificent gift” might have been better spread around among them by the merchant, especially now that they were working all year round and there was no time to procure wood, which was so necessary for existence. Instead fuel was now a commodity in the form of coal to be bought at Newman’s. Moreover there was no time to make from wood the hundred things necessary, such as wheelbarrows and handbars, boats and oars. No time to make a handle for a saw. Everything had to be bought. And when they came ashore, the clergyman would be hounding them for their ten shillings each to pay the church expenses. One of them said there would be no baptizing, marrying, or burying his loved ones if he did not pay.106 Yes, if the merchant had held off on the stone, and paid a little more for the fish, £8,000 could have gone a long way to make their lives and the lives of all they knew a little easier. And they would go to a church of wood that they helped build with a thankful heart. Hunt’s church, though built of stone, did not last. The 1890s were not kind to Newfoundland Gothic of the stone variety. Prowse managed to get the Hermitage church into his book in 1895 before the structure was destroyed by frost. Apparently the experts who came out to the colony were not up to the task, and “the climate soon consumed it.” Prowse was too late for that other church of stone, Feild’s cathedral. He could only include photos of its destruction by fire. All that was left was St Paul’s at Harbour Grace, unless one spoke of that “severe” structure called St Mary’s with its “grim symmetry” in St John’s.107 It is difficult to gauge the spiritual interest of Hermitage with its new building and a clergyman in the community. Colley could hardly believe that only three people came out to Holy Communion, one of the smallest numbers anywhere in the bay, yet even Hermitage was larger than most. Furthermore, when they did come, they dragged their feet, showing up after the new bell had stopped and “the Service had begun for some time.” It may have been that Low Anglicans were not too pleased with the Tractarian project. John Marshall, of the evangelical nss, was stationed there before he went to Belleoram. It is also likely that anti-Tractarian publications were in circulation. Gaden said that the Collett pamphlet was “in general circulation” in the mission in 1854. As early as 1830 Wix said that nss teachers “regularly receive from England” copies of the London Record, and White later accused them of loaning them out “for the purpose of perverting the feelings of the people and leading them to forsake the Church and Services.” The Record began attacking Tractarianism in England as early as 1838, had featured articles against Bishop Feild and his Tractarianism in

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Newfoundland since 1846, and even addressed the matters in the Collett pamphlet.108 There were also Methodist magazines about the coast with articles against Tractarianism, identified in combat as Puseyism, telling of its “disloyal and anti-Protestant principles.” As St Saviour’s was being built at Hermitage, the November 1854 issue of the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine carried news of a revival at Leeds in a church of the same name funded by E.B. Pusey himself. It was a Gothic building with the interior Tractarian architecture, liturgy, and ritual: “intoned services, reverential bowings … surpliced choristers … an ‘altar’ whose sacred enclosure, as seen from the body of the church, is well fitted to inspire beholders with some mysterious dread.” An evangelical clergyman of the Church of England came to Leeds and began to preach “What must we do to be saved?” and a great revival broke out, during which a number of clergymen themselves were converted. The article held out the hope that “this religious awakening” could happen in any church of the Church of England and affectionately called for prayer for it to happen. It also reminded Methodists of the unique bond with the Church of England that they had among all Protestants: “As a body, we have no antipathies, no dislike, of her. We are not envious of her higher rank, nor have we embarked on any unholy crusade to tear up her foundations and consign her to ruin. Our venerable Founder regarded her as the greatest and noblest institution in the land … ‘God bless the Church of England!’” Readers may have wondered whether something similar could happen at St Saviour’s at Hermitage.109 Having had nss schools at Grole and Hermitage, many could read, especially young people. Many, of course, could not, but they still coveted reading material so that a visiting captain or some other literate person could read it to them. For example, T.B. Polden reported from Wreck Cove, near Coomb’s Cove, a conversation he had with an older man who requested a book from him: “I asked him what good it would be to him, as there was no one in the harbour who could read it. The man replied ‘I’ll get somebody or other to read it to me, for our skipper that comes to take fish can read, and I’ll get him to read it to me.’ I most readily complied with his request and gave him several tracts. He said, ‘I’ll get them sewed together, and put in my Prayer Book, where they shan’t get hurted.’ ‘Prayer Book,’ said I, ‘Have you got a Prayer Book?’ ‘Yes, I have, sir’ was his answer, ‘and I would not part with it for any money, for it was my poor father’s, who is dead and gone.’”110 When a visitor dropped by, often such reading occasions were really events similar to attending the cinema today. Wix recounted one such event at Chaleur Bay:

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Some, indeed, of the poor people into whose hands the books have fallen, are unable themselves to read, but then they bring out the precious bundle of highly valued tracts from the sanctuary of their house chest, and, unrolling the piece of cotton or cloth in which they are carefully wrapped, they beg any temporary sojourner, or travelling bird of passage, who is a scholar, to read them to their assembled household. They availed themselves thus of my services between the hours of our public devotions; and, as I have frequently been on other occasions, I was pleased to see that they had much feeling. At Chaleur Bay, I had an audience, who gathered their chairs nearer to me, and nearer, as their interest in a beautiful religious narrative, which I was reading, heightened, until one and another lifted the hand, and the corner of the rough apron in silence, to wipe the tear from their sunburnt cheeks; and one woman, at the close of the tale, took up the chord for the rest, and remarked with a striking simplicity, “It is very feeling, Sir!”111 There may also have been a residual Methodism in the community. William Jeynes, sent out by Spencer, reported 183 Methodists in Chaleur Bay in 1840. It is true that the Methodists thought that Hermitage was “lost to us,” especially with the abrupt departure of the missionary, but even so, there would be still be a general Protestantism not in sympathy with the leaning of the new Anglicanism.112 There were also troubles. For instance, Colley’s “nurse girl … ran straight from the house, and … threw herself into the sea and was drowned.”113 But all in all, the Church of England recouped their losses as latecomers to Fortune Bay. Colley at Hermitage Cove and White at Harbour Breton continued the sacramentalist Anglicanism of their predecessor, George Mountain. When Colley was at Bonne Bay, near Pushtrough, for example, he leaned on Mr Lee, “one of my old communicants” who was about to go fishing that Friday instead of to Holy Communion. Colley attempted to persuade him by mentioning how “grieved” Mountain would be to know that he was passing up the sacrament. Lee “turned round, laid his head upon his hands, and leant upon a cask close by for some moments, undergoing, apparently, great mental conflict.” Soon after he had “cast off his fishing-dress, and had put on his Sunday clothes.”114 By 1869 all that their opponents could boast was one lonely Methodist at Harbour Breton and three at Hermitage. Bishop Feild even considered making a foray into Grand Bank and Fortune once when they were without a missionary. He estimated that if he had a clergyman of “sufficient discretion and zeal,” he could take the territory from the Methodists. It

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was not to be. Meanwhile the evangelical Anglicans could continue their faith at Belleoram and in many of the 123 communities that were out of the limelight and in the path of a visiting clergyman only once or twice a year.115 In conclusion, the Church of England fumbled the ball from the beginning in Burin, which had become the most important outport south of St John’s in the first half of the nineteenth century. Both the Methodists and the Anglicans sent missionaries there shortly after the Napoleonic Wars. The Anglican missionary left in less than a year, while the Methodists remained, not only to gain many converts, but to have such a diffusive effect on the Church of England in the bay that when Bishop Spencer visited over two decades later it was difficult to tell one from the other. Bishop Feild was slow to send a clergyman to Burin, so only the Methodist missionary was on hand to minister comfort during the trial of the 1846 September hurricane. Cyrus Gathercole came a year later, only to see Methodist gains throughout his tenure. Collecting for the Church Society in the poverty of the late 1840s did not help his popularity, nor did the new Gothic church opened in 1850. People rejected Bishop Feild’s solemn Anglicanism and reached for the joy of Methodism. Matters went from bad to worse when Gathercole was charged with committing “some improprieties” with various women. Finally, when Feild chose to replace him with the even more Tractarian William Rozier the project became unmoored. The Anglicans were nearly lost in a sea of Methodism as people chose “religious intoxication” over the solemnity of the Bishop Feild. Yet while Rozier was in his former mission, Lamaline, the Anglicans went Gothic with him and the Methodists made no gains whatever. While the Methodists took over Grand Bank and Fortune in the first half of the century, there was still a Protestant ecumenism at Harbour Breton and Fortune Bay, even though the Newfoundland School Society exercised considerable influence in the area. It nearly ended altogether with the arrival of the “real clergyman,” Jacob George Mountain, who, much like his bishop who came to the area rebaptizing, strived to segregate Anglicans with his Tractarian sacramentalism. However the only record of parishioners coming on board were recent immigrants from England working at Newman’s who attempted to cow Methodists with the apostolic succession. Hunt’s Gothic St Saviour’s at Hermitage, an anomalous project of one individual, seems to have benefitted few, since he built it in a thinly populated area. In contrast, the evangelical Anglican John Marshall kept up a sustained ministry at Belleoram with the nss, remarkably stayed true to his values, and paid for it by Feild refusing to ordain him priest. Mountain’s successor, the steadfast and enduring William Kepple White, whom Feild

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made the dean of Fortune Bay, came regularly to preside over Holy Communion, and Feild visited for confirmation from time to time. All three seemed to know where to tread as the Anglicans asserted their hegemony through minister, magistrate, and merchant over Hermitage Bay and the western side of Fortune Bay from Harbour Breton. Though there was little to sustain a Tractarian focus in the mission, once one went beyond Harbour Breton and Hermitage, Feild retained the sheep in the fold in a way that he could only dream about at Burin or anywhere north of St John’s, even if they were not exactly the kind of sheep he desired. He also had success to the west.

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8 The Western Shore and the West Coast: A People Who “Do Just as They Please” A calm nearly all last night, with fog and a heavy swell. The shifting and knocking of the rudder took away all sleep from my eyes. The morning broke with thick fog, and we heard the noise of the waves on the shore, and among the breakers, before we could see any land. This is always harsh music to our ears. But before eight o’clock the fog broke and let us see the coast. The captain most strangely determined that we were eastward of La Poele … I soon saw that he was mistaken, and believed that we were nearing Port aux Basques … Soon after, however, the wind came ahead, and we could make no way against it and the strong current. We fired a gun, as the wind was getting up with every appearance of thick weather. After making two more tacks, in which we lost rather than advanced, we saw a boat apparently making towards us. [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk” Church Ship, on the Coast of Labrador, and Round the Whole Island of Newfoundland, in the Year 1849, 23

burgeo –la poile The “western shore,” that region of the south coast west of Fortune Bay to Cape Ray, showed up in the spg records in 1827 when Governor Cochrane took Peter Pering, spg missionary at Ferryland, with him along the coast in his yacht as far as White Bear Bay, in the vicinity of Ramea and Burgeo. Pering noted that the population of the western shore was “very scattered and thin,” but that at Deer Island at the entrance to the bay the few settlers “were regularly in the habit of reading the service of the Church among themselves.”1 When Archdeacon Coster, upon the advice of Bullock, sent the clergyman James Robertson on reconnaissance to the south coast in the summer of 1830 to ascertain where a clergyman should be stationed, he did a disservice to the western shore by travelling on hms Manly from Harbour Breton. The man-of-war headed straight to Port aux Basques and bypassed the settlements in the region, including Deer Island, Ramea, Burgeo, and La

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Poile. During his three-day stay before heading back to Lawn on the Burin Peninsula, Robertson was able to obtain the population of thirteen settlements from Cape Ray to La Poile. Except for Isle aux Morts and Rose Blanche, which had twenty-four and twenty-three residents respectively, the settlements had less than half the population of Port aux Basques with thirty-eight. Having little information about them, perhaps he eased his mind by concluding, “Whatever is reported of one settlement may with little or no variation be applied to all.” He did little ministering except to hold a service in the house of John Bragg and to baptize six children.2 Remarkably, a second Church of England clergyman visited the region in 1830. Archdeacon Wix accompanied the governor in the fall and visited from Bay St George to Hermitage. Immorality, that great cause for the missionary enterprise, did not seem to be an issue at all. At Port aux Basques people brought their children to be baptized. At Isle aux Morts, George Harvey was presented in absentia a gold medal “struck in England under the direction of his Majesty’s government” for an act of rescue, aided by his son and daughter, that presumably was a beacon of morality to the whole empire as an example of caring, bravery, and selflessness. At Burgeo the people had taken it upon themselves to worship on Sundays through the voluntary services of their local lay reader, Thomas Strickland, a resident of thirty-nine years from Devonshire. What was mentioned in Wix’s diary was not immorality, but their west-of-England dialect and style of singing hymns.3 Like Robertson, Wix did not report seeing a single Methodist, yet there were Methodists from Burgeo to Port aux Basques because of the migratory fishery to the area from Grand Bank and Fortune.4 They were among those at Burgeo who gave the visiting Methodist missionary, William Marshall, such a warm welcome in 1841. He reported to the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Committee in London that he had to preach in the open air because there was no place large enough to contain the people who came out to hear him and they donated ninety-eight pounds towards a building for worship. Most significantly, he noted that there was “none of that prejudice against Methodism and in favour of the Established Church to contend with,” which was present to some degree in the Hermitage– Harbour Breton area, because previous to migrating to Burgeo “several of the people have set under our Ministry in Grand Bank and Fortune.” The Methodists had made a strategic error by focusing on Hermitage and sending a missionary there in 1839, instead of to Burgeo, where they received such a welcome. Marshall urged the committee to send a missionary to Burgeo and the western shore, but to no avail.5 Thus, Bishop Spencer seriously outmanoeuvred the Methodists in placing a clergyman at Burgeo. His original strategy for the south coast was to

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work towards placing “a clergyman in full order” at Burin who would supervise deacons along the whole south coast. The clergyman for Burin was a decade in the making, but Spencer placed Martin Blackmore at Burgeo in 1842 and he quickly reaped the Methodist gains.6 Blackmore reported back to Spencer just one year after Marshall’s well-received visit that people were coming out to hear him in stores and houses in both Upper and Lower Burgeo and they had made plans to build not one, but two churches. When Bishop Feild, accompanied by Bridge, came into port in the Hawk in 1845, he consecrated both churches, administered “the Holy Sacrament,” and confirmed 102 people.7 With two churches consecrated and thereby made securely the property of the Church of England, they had clearly taken on the Methodists and wrestled Burgeo from their hands. Blackmore was able to appeal to the Methodists as an evangelical Anglican through his Protestant emphasis on studying the scriptures, his lectures on the Nonconformist John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, his focus on the Lord’s Supper as “memorials of their Savior’s love” rather than as a Tractarian Real Presence, and on the “full hope of salvation through the Merits of the Saviour.” Blackmore’s Anglicanism was nearer to that of the Newfoundland School Society than it was to Methodism, but it was a far cry from Tractarianism.8 Still, there was a gradual accommodation to Feild’s wishes and ways, beginning with his first visit in 1845. When Feild came in July, he spent an evening on the Hawk “in making arrangements for future operations.” Blackmore had begun a collection for a stone font in June, a predilection of Feild‘s, which finally arrived, probably on one of Newman’s boats from England, and was used at Lower Burgeo for the first time in May 1847. Tractarian accretions continued – the replacement of “the east window” with “a fine three-lighted Gothic window,” the wearing of the surplice, and “three small windows put into the Church,” probably lancet, and holding services on saints’ days.9 To provide for a growing population, Blackmore began a subscription to extend the church a second time and to build a gallery to maximize space, a work that he said was nearly completed by September 1847. Feild, a man to whom galleries were anathema, arrived just in time in 1848 to rearrange the internal architecture and requested “an aisle on the north side, running the whole length of the church … instead of a gallery at the west end, which had been contemplated and all but commenced.”10 When Blackmore left, Feild had only a deacon to replace him, John Cunningham, one of a half-dozen young men, “all in their twenties” whom Feild recruited through his friends in England. Cunningham was thus probably more Tractarian than Blackmore, and especially so after he attended Feild’s

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Theological Institution, which he did with Gathercole, Rozier, and White. Feild sent him to Brigus for a year, and then brought him on the Hawk on his visit to Burgeo in the summer of 1848.11 The following summer Feild was back in Burgeo visiting the young Cunningham and consecrating two cemeteries, absolutely pleased with how the people related to both him and Cunningham, especially noting that the men were “gentle, I might even say gentlemanly in their manners, most kind and obliging, docile and morigerous, and yet manly and intelligent.”12 It would appear he met nobody with independent views. With the couple of additions to the church at Lower Burgeo, but still not enough for the increasing population, Cunningham helped plan a new church in the early 1850s, and under the direction of Feild, there was no doubt it would be a Gothic structure. “Very handsome, large, and wellarranged,” according to Feild, it was designed by his diocesan architect, William Grey, who by 1853 had drawn plans for eight churches and additions for two others. When it was completed in 1856, Joseph Small, who attended a service at the church in 1859, wrote that it could seat 400 and was a “cruciform shape with pointed tower at the crossing.” Not to be left out, the Upper Burgeo church received a more Tractarian stamp with the “addition of a chancel and a new arrangement of the seats.” Ordained priest in 1852, Cunningham remained for forty-six years.13 The Methodists were horrified at the Church of England elbowing their way in and taking over their work in Burgeo. Over a decade later they continued to recall the loss that they had experienced when the Church of England “appropriated” the £100 they had collected locally for a Methodist chapel. But all was not lost, for at Upper Burgeo many of the seventeen families, though they had an Anglican church, had Methodist leanings and still were talking of building a chapel. It appears not to have been wishful thinking, since towards the end of his term Blackmore reported there were forty Methodists at Burgeo.14 In fact the Anglican church at Upper Burgeo was closed during the winter, as all the residents vacated the settlement each October, spent the winter at La Poile Bay, and returned in April. This transhumance may have been a factor in their greater prosperity than the people of Lower Burgeo. Feild observed that they were “not so dependent on the merchants as their neighbours at Lower Burgeo, they have better means.” He was particularly impressed with “William Anderson and his wife … the mother in and of Israel in this settlement … Here is a good example of a Newfoundland planter and planter’s family; easy in manner and speech, serious and gentle; and yet their life is, or has been, of the hardest and most laborious; fishing here all the summer, and in the winter retiring to the woods. But by industry and prudence they are placed, through God’s

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blessing, in independent circumstances, and are respected and honoured by a large circle of relations and neighbours.”15 While their transhumance, not for “retiring,” but for wood production, was a normal practice of many Newfoundland communities, the Methodists of Upper Burgeo had an added incentive for going to La Poile Bay. There was a concentration of Methodists in the vicinity at Garia, Petites, and Harbour Le Cou, and it is likely that they also went to La Poile Bay to their winter quarters and met with those from Upper Burgeo for prayer meetings and class meetings.16 Methodists were accustomed to not depend on a clergyman but to take initiative and meet together for their spiritual edification. Thus when Blackmore went to Petites on his summer visit in 1846, he found that “the people had just assembled, they being accustomed to have prayers amongst themselves.” In the summer the Upper Burgeo Methodists had visitors who would encourage them spiritually. Methodist fishermen from Grand Bank and Fortune fished in the area, and some of them were accustomed to having prayer and testimony meetings on their vessels and ashore. For example, a person wrote from Petites, “There have been some of the Grand Bank people here this spring and they brought ‘good tidings of great joy to us.’ They have been praying with us, and blessed be God! they have not prayed in vain. Forty-five persons have been truly converted to God.” Grand Bank fishermen related to the Methodist missionary John Brewster that they personally went ashore “in the neighbourhood of Petites” each night and told the people of their conversions to Jesus Christ, prayed with them to do the same, and “whole families were brought to God.”17 While Feild was at Rose Blanche in the summer of 1849 he “was questioned by one Beck … as to my opinion of ‘the new religion at Sand Bank.’”18 It is likely that the Grand Bank fishermen had gone ashore, ignited a revival at Sandbanks, Burgeo, before they had reached Petites. Thus, though it appeared that Feild had wrapped up Burgeo for the Church of England, especially through “consecrating” properties and the gradual accommodation of Tractarian values at Lower Burgeo, the fishermen and their families at Upper Burgeo did not let the coals die out but instead kept the Methodist fire burning vigorously, even while attending Blackmore’s, and later Cunningham’s, services on Sundays during the summer. There were also individuals, of course, who wanted nothing to do with religion, neither Anglican of any stripe, nor Methodist. Only two were noted in Blackmore’s journal – one “by no means temperate,” and the other, poor.19 How Tractarian the Anglicans became in other outports in the Burgeo mission is an open question. In 1845 Feild visited only Rose Blanche and La Poile along the whole coast between Port aux Basques and Hermitage

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Bay. At La Poile he had a service in the home of the merchant’s agent to which people were called by the merchant’s bell. The people along the coast saw Blackmore only once a year, and sometimes not even that, and during a scattered emergency visit to Ramea or elsewhere. When Feild did visit, the only Tractarian emblem they saw was the surplice he wore, for what took place was a kitchen Anglicanism held in houses with no supporting Gothic architecture to help foster a heightened sense of mystery. Occasionally people went to Burgeo for religious rites, especially infant baptism, in one instance from forty-five miles distant. And on one particularly fine day in July, people came “from the more distant islands” to a service.20 La Poile, in fact, did not appear to hold much Tractarian promise for Feild. All he had to send there in 1847 was a deacon, Thomas Appleby, a former brewer’s clerk who had been a Baptist previously in England. He passed his examination and Feild thought he was “a very pleasing person,” but doubted if he had the mental or physical stamina required of a missionary. He questioned whether Appleby would demand from the people the required payments to the Church Society, since he “was not quite the man to pursue any system of rigour, or perhaps I might say, of vigor.”21 Feild certainly thought he was right, and said so, when in just two years Appleby had to return temporarily to England on becoming so “deranged” as to “not know his wife.” Apparently the problem began when he was “caught by a breeze of wind in his little boat” about thirty miles from home, and had to be rescued. A time in England revived him and Feild ordained him priest in Harbour Breton in 1851. But matters did not go well. Appleby thought his salary was to be increased upon his ordination, but Feild declared that he had “never held out any expectation” of any such increase. He applied to the spg for the raise, saying that he had Feild’s “sanction,” but Feild said he did not. The spg complicated matters further by wanting to give him the raise, and Feild saying that if it did, it would have to give a raise to “12 or 15 more” missionaries, also. Appleby then got himself into debt and requested a bailout. This led to more wrangling, with Feild finally advocating for the spg to pay it off, lest Appleby “go either to jail or the lunatic asylum.” He wanted to go somewhere – variously, PEI, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and back to England – and finally, England was where it was. Feild said, “He went like a doomed man, not wishing to go or to stay … If he ever had any mind, it is gone … Mrs Appleby was taken very ill soon after their arrival here, and could not leave the house and scarcely her bed, but she was taken on board the vessel.”22 Nearly pulling his hair out, Feild sent another missive across the Atlantic to Hawkins, faulting the spg for not providing him with the right kind of missionaries:

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Can no real Clergyman be persuaded to volunteer their services? Must the Colonial Church (which the present Archbishop of Canterbury has most truly and feelingly said ought to be served by the elite) be always made to recruit her Clergy from behind the counters and desks of druggists and linendrapers, or from the ranks of National Schoolmasters and Scripture readers? Such, with only three or four exceptions, were all the clergy in Newfoundland; very good men the majority and, I dare believe, above their former callings: but how different do they appear – how different are they from such men as the Archdeacon, Mountain, Hutchinson, and Phelps. Cannot the Society find such men any where at all? Is it not a matter of note, or worthy to be noted that of these four only Mr Phelps came to us chosen by the Society, or through the Society’s Agency, while Appleby, Roberts, Boland, were I believe selected and sent … there must be a fault and deficiency somewhere. I greatly trust that St Augustine’s may in some degree supply the deficiency if not correct the fault but until men of family and fortune can be brought to enter St Augustine’s with a view and determination of serving the Colonial Church or promoting the Missionary cause, there is too much danger of its degenerating into a Protestant Maynooth [the large Roman Catholic seminary in Maynooth, Ireland, so feared by the English], or at least of not realizing the Archibishop’s wishes and expectations. In the meanwhile cannot the Society through the Universities, or by the Bishops in their several Dioceses call out the elite – the men of highminded devotedness to come over and help us at least for a few years? or would not some of the Society’s Agents, especially the chief Secretary direct their eloquence on the platforms to the stirring up of the good and great, to this best and greatest, because hardest and least requited (in this world) of all labours and services for Christ’s sake.23 Meanwhile, Feild must have been feeling a little shaky himself. His dealings with Appleby revealed his vulnerability as a bishop to enforce his will in the diocese, when he did not have a willing missionary of Tractarian sensibilities. Two of his larger problems had to do with communication. Specifically, despite Feild’s pleading to the contrary, the spg allowed its missionaries to correspond directly with the committee, instead of requiring that their communication be mediated by the bishop. This gave Feild only a tenuous hold on his missionaries, because at times he did not even know what the spg was telling them or what they were saying to the committee. For instance, in the summer of 1855 the committee had told Appleby that he had to leave La Poile, but Feild, although he was there in the Hawk

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in July, did not find out until September. He immediately became alarmed lest the Methodists take advantage of the absence of a missionary, and asked them to fill the vacancy immediately.24 The rope totally slipped out of his hands until the following summer, for during that whole time he did not know what was happening in La Poile, or even whether Appleby was still there. Several times he complained about it to Hawkins, before Appleby finally showed up in St John’s in May or early June 1856. His predicament was exacerbated because there was no direct communication between La Poile and St John’s. Through trade, La Poile was in contact with the Maritimes, New England, and Jersey, but not with St John’s. Said Feild, “I only hear from, or of, the place by way of Sydney, Cape Breton.” He had formerly thought that Appleby had left in 1854 and actually sent another missionary, Joshua Duval, only to find Appleby still there. Thinking that Appleby was leaving shortly, Duval left his wife at La Poile and went on to Port aux Basques. Feild at St John’s had no idea what was going on. Similarly, when he thought that Appleby had left La Poile in 1855, he asked the spg to send another missionary “via Halifax and Sydney, Cape Breton. At Sydney he could find in a few days, if not immediately, (till about the middle of December) a boat to convey him to Lapoile or Channel, and from one he might proceed to the other.”25 That did not happen, so after two years Feild finally sent George Hooper of Burin, who had trained at his college. This appointment did not help his cause or serve the people well, for shortly after the end of his tenure at La Poile, Feild had to dismiss him for being a drunkard.26 Thus Feild was floundering about, trying to administer the southwest corner of Newfoundland. And Feild did not only have to deal with missionaries and the spg, he also had to contend with the people at La Poile, and Tractarianism did not appear to be their brand of spirituality. It certainly was not for the mercantile agent, J.M. Nicolle. Jersey agents tended to be Methodist or Methodist sympathizers, as, for instance at Jersey Harbour. When Feild first visited La Poile in 1845, he was received with open arms by Thomas Renouf, “the chief agent of the establishment,” who read prayers every Sunday “in a convenient room in the merchant’s house.” Feild was profuse with his thanks for Renouf, saying that he “exerted himself in every way to show due respect to the Bishop, and forward the purposes of his visitation.” In contrast, when he came three years later to consecrate the church and graveyard, there is not a word of reference to any kindness of Renouf, except that he moored “at Mr Renouf’s buoy.” The next year Renouf and Appleby joined Feild at Rose Blanche, where he had a service in a fish store wrapped in the ephemeral Gothic of calico sheets. Mr Quin, the merchant, and Re-

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nouf then joined Feild for a meal on board the Hawk. But again there was not a personal word of thanks to Renouf as he had given in 1845. There was obviously a drawing aback and a cooling in his relationship to the bishop, attributable likely to the discovery of his Tractarianism.27 Then in 1855 Feild made the startling claim that the agent at La Poile was “something more than a dissenter, and has an utter dislike to Bishops in general, and in particular, I believe, to myself.” When Feild visited there in July 1855 he made a terse entry in his journal, although he was there for two full days. He spoke of neither the merchant nor the people, except to say that the church had been “lately painted.” There appeared to have been little of a Gothic nature in the church to warm his heart, or in the agent, or at least nothing worthy of mention.28

port aux basques To Bishop Feild’s dismay there was a Protestant spirituality in full bloom at Port aux Basques upon his arrival in 1845. He noted that many expressed “earnest desires” for a church and had already chosen a site to build it. He held a service, probably as visiting preachers before him, in the school that they had built and wrote in his diary for publication that there were “many church people” there, meaning Anglicans, which was probably correct, but could have led to a false impression that Port aux Basques was a Church of England outport.29 In fact, there was a diversity in the outport possibly due to its proximity to Nova Scotia. The Methodist missionary William Marshall stated that Warren MacNeill, who welcomed him and allowed him to preach in his cook room, was a son of “one of our most respectable members of Society in Halifax” and that his sister was married to William Webb, a fellow missionary in Nova Scotia. John S. Peach said in 1850 that while some had agreed to pay five pounds for a Methodist missionary, they were “mostly independent,” that is, Congregationalist, or possibly Baptist, believing in local church autonomy. On his 1849 visit Feild suspected they were Methodists, when on the day of St James the Apostle they went fishing instead of attending his service. He found they were “indifferent or something more.” He explained that many of the inhabitants were “from Fortune Bay, and from that part, which is the stronghold of nothing strong or stable,” meaning Methodists from Grand Bank and Fortune. Some of them may have been Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in Nova Scotia, who believed that the local congregation should be free from centralized control and therefore did not prefer either the Church of England or the Methodists.30 Feild said that they were “all fishermen” and they built a church shortly

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after his 1845 visit, which they made available for use “as they said, ‘by any good man who came along,’ Clergyman, Methodist preacher, Baptist, or any other professed Protestant.’”31 Feild was anxious, for as a strategist he saw Port aux Basques at the western extremity of the south coast as a critical post to occupy. As the chosen terminus for the telegraph cable to America, it was “likely to be a place of considerable traffic, and much more largely inhabited.” He immediately set his focus to obtain the church and offered a clergyman’s services “in the hope of obtaining settlement.” He justified himself, saying that “the majority” wanted the church “consecrated” for the exclusive use of a Church of England clergyman, though a “a few of the more wealthy planters … stout Methodists” who had built the church at their own expense wanted to be paid for their equity in the building. He did not say how much of a majority were in agreement with his strategy, but enough were against it for it to not work immediately. But when Feild came by in 1855 his clergyman “had so far succeeded with the people” that only two were holding out against his design. They finally agreed to let go the building if they were reimbursed fifty pounds. Feild immediately handed it to them “willingly, and I may say joyfully,” and consecrated the building on the spot, thus barring it immediately from “any good man who came along.” His strategy had worked and he ebulliently reported to Ernest Hawkins, the spg secretary, “this happy termination of a long protracted siege.”32 Though the mission was then “considered as established,” it was not long before he became anxious again about whether he could continue to occupy the ground taken. When he came to La Poile and realized that Appleby was gone, he urgently called on Hawkins to send a replacement, and quickly, via Halifax and Sydney instead of St John’s, or else “the greatest achievement of my present visitation, by which the whole Western coast has been secured, please God,” would be in vain. He was particularly worried on hearing talk that the Wesleyan Methodist Conference of Eastern British America, which had its inaugural meeting in Halifax in July, had decided to station their first missionary to the area. “Under these circumstances I would earnestly entreat the Society not to allow either of these Missions to be vacant.”33 In fact the Methodists were wringing their hands over the success of Bishop Feild. John S. Peach at Grand Bank was in a state of near despair as he pleaded with the Committee in London to send a missionary to the western shore. He informed them that many families in the area were Methodists who migrated from Grand Bank, Fortune, and Burin, for example all 20 families in Petites. After they built a chapel, Bishop Feild and his missionaries made “frequent attempts to arrest it out of their hands, by

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allowing the Bishop to consecrate it.” But the people had resolved, “‘we shall not give up our property.’” The people told the clergymen that they could preach in the chapel at any time, but because they would not hand it over, “the Parson passes by and never calls in.” It was not until two years later that a missionary was appointed.34 Charles Comben had to contend with a vigorous Tractarian missionary in Wellmein W. Le Gallais in the Port aux Basques mission, who answered the call to the priesthood when he was a clerk with Nicolle and Co., Jersey merchants at La Poile. He met Jacob George Mountain who visited from Harbour Breton, was trained by him there and at Feild’s Theological Institute, “resembling his master in zeal and fervour.” Gallais informed Feild in 1861 that the extensive renovations on the church, begun in 1857, were then completed. The first action taken was to throw out the Wesleyan hymnals and then began the real work of transforming the church from the Protestant “early Newfoundland style” to a Gothic box, both internally and externally. A tower, cross-topped spire, and lancet windows were added, and a chancel was furnished with an “altar covered with a beautiful cloth with embroidered monogram” for weekly Holy Communion. “At the west” the gallery was “pulled down” and “the lofty pulpit … tumbled down” from “the centre of the east wall.” Moreover the church was furnished with “a large stone font, of ancient and approved pattern.”35 It appeared that with the ardent Le Gallais and his Gothic statement Feild had solidly cemented Tractarianism in Port aux Basques and the western shore. The triumph was celebrated throughout England and the empire in the ecclesiastical periodicals of the day, the Gospel Missionary, the Mission Field, and the spg Quarterly Paper, and not just in word but also in illustration.36 To Protestants this crass dethronement of the Bible and of preaching the Word of God for salvation, Feild’s regime of priesthood and sacrament, was “very unpopular.” By 1859 they had built a second chapel, which they then furnished with a steeple and bell, and presumably with the Wesleyan hymnals from the first one.37 Yet their main arsenal against the solemnity of Anglicanism was not architecture and liturgy, but ecstasy, and also, interestingly, ceremony. Joseph Gaetz and Charles Ladner, Methodist missionaries at Channel and Petites, introduced the Sons of Temperance to Newfoundland in 1860 and 1861. The branches probably originated in Halifax, where the Athenaeum Division began in 1851.38 The organization was a militant version of the temperance movement, with public marches in regalia for teetotalism, in which children also participated as members of a Band of Hope. During the time for “cluing up” with the merchant in the fall, the Sons of Temperance held a conspicuous “demonstration” at Port aux Basques, since it was “an awful time for drinking in

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this region.” The following year they and the Band of Hope “walked in procession … the scene was magnificent, the like was never before witnessed on the shore.” They “proceeded to a store kindly lent us by our friend A. Waddell, Esq., Agent of the Halifax Room,” where both Gaetz and Ladner addressed the crowd. Le Gallais opposed the whole movement and was worked up into such a state that he collected tracts of the London Tract Society and burned them.39 Nevertheless, the ceremony of the Sons of Temperance was nothing compared to what grew out of it, namely, revivals, which were “more glorious and more noble” than a mere moral reform movement. Both Gaetz and Ladner were surprised by their intensity, writing that there was “a singularity about the revivals both at Petites and Channel for which we can scarcely account.” This was the first time a revival had occurred in Port aux Basques and they were overjoyed: “God in answer to prayer came to our help – broke down the hard hearted, subdued the stubborn will, and imparted that peace to the soul which the world cannot give, and which it has no power to take away. It is pleasing to hear the testimonies of these newborn souls.” Because of these revivals at Petites, Garia, and Port aux Basques, the Church of England, which had appeared to have “secured” the western shore, now had to worry that “the humiliating fact of two Dissenting ministers being established” there would become a reality. Furthermore, some of the people sitting in the pews in front of Le Gallais were Methodists who had migrated from Grand Bank.40 Le Gallais thought they had become permanent members of the Church of England, but to his chagrin they left as soon as a chapel was built. This did not mean that the Church of England in Channel–Port aux Basques was down and out by any means. It too had its “processions, banners, and decorations,” but it had something of another order altogether. One of the most intense experiences of solemnity that Le Gallais ever felt was not in the church at all, but on the deck of a vessel in the harbour: Having obtained permission of the captain of a large vessel lying alongside the wharf, I went on board the different vessels in the harbour, and acquainted the men with my intention of celebrating the Church service on the vessel’s deck … At the appointed time a much larger number had assembled than could have been accommodated in the schoolroom, and the service began. The congregation joined heartily and reverently in the service – kneeling … at the proper times, and remaining uncovered from the beginning of the service to the end. For my part, I do not think I was ever more deeply impressed with the beauty and solemnity of our liturgy. The ship so

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well represented the Church – the wind sighing through the rigging – the yards on the mast forming the emblem of salvation – the barren rocks that enclose the harbour – the wharves and stores close at hand, usually teeming with busy life, and now quiet and deserted – the kneeling groups on the large clear deck; with the solemnly uttered prayers, and the bright blue canopy of heaven above – all made up a scene, the impressiveness of which must have been felt by the least susceptible.41 The event is remarkable in that Le Gallais attained this ardent feeling of solemnity in the total absence of Gothic space – no open-timbered ceilings and lancet windows, no chancel, and no altar. But Le Gallais had so attuned himself to Tractarian sensibility that the whole harbour event was profuse with spiritual nuance. Nature itself veiled a more substantial spiritual reality. The “wind sighing through the rigging” was to him the rustling robes of angels “whose faces see God,” as “every breath of air” did for John Henry Newman.42 In the yards he saw crosses. He and the fishermen and seamen were just “a little lower than the angels,” all kneeling before the cross with the “bright blue canopy of heaven” above them whispering the words of Psalms 8, 19, and 104 to their spirits and his – words that many of them likely knew from memory. Le Gallais himself would have been well-versed also in Keble’s Christian Year and trained “with searching rapturous glance … tracing out Wisdom, Power, and Love, in earth or sky.”43 His experience of “reverence and awe” on the deck of that vessel affirmed him in his mission that the Anglican way and liturgy was attuned to the spirit of God, no matter how loud and verbose and exuberant the Methodists were, as they claimed otherwise. But there was a downside. The Roman Catholic priest Thomas Sears lamented that many Catholics from France with names such as Le Grandais, Le Roux, Le Breton, and Le Fillatre had joined the Church of England, especially at Port aux Basques, since it became the goal of its ministers to “strive to make themselves and their followers believe that they are a part and parcel of the ancient and Apostolic Church. And they strive to conform as much as their peculiar tenets will permit to the exterior practices of our Holy Church.” However, he went on to say that this also made the bridge back “to the bosom of the Catholic Church” that much easier to cross, and “some instances of this have already occurred.” He looked forward to more converts, not only from the Church of England, because “the ritualistic ministers have begun to introduce High Church principles,” but “even from the ranks of Protestantism.”44 The only drawback was a severe shortage of priests.

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codroy and sandy point, bay st george The far west showed up first in the spg records when William Bullock visited it with Governor Cochrane in 1829. He returned with a strong conviction that a missionary should be sent somewhere between Bay St George and Fortune Bay. He felt he did not have enough information to suggest where he should be stationed. Bay St George and the Bay of Islands had larger populations but morally were “extremely humiliating.”45 When Wix visited with the governor in 1830, he found a pronounced diversity west of Cape Ray, unlike Robertson, who conjectured that there was “little or no variation” in communities east of it. At Bay St George residents included Mi’kmaq, new Scottish immigrants from Cape Breton, French, and English. He married the daughter of Mr Messervey, in whose house he held services, to “a native of Normandy.” A Quebec merchant, Henry Forrest, and his wife Mary, from New York, summer residents, were teaching Sunday school. Neither did Wix see any immorality to catch his eye. Instead he was struck with the “natural simplicity and courtesy of manners” of the people, even though without a missionary.46 At Codroy the population was similarly diversified, being a mix of “French, English, Scotch, Irish, and Indians.” It was on the French Shore, being west of Port aux Basques, and the people felt they had an “uncertain footing,” since occasionally “the French cruisers … threatened to turn them away.” And they did not have to worry about just the French. All were Catholic except the English. If the Catholic Scots, immigrants from Nova Scotia, persecuted them “on account of their religion,” as they did at nearby Little River, there was no Church of England magistrate on the shore, and St John’s was so remote that “the poor people could not sustain the expense” to appeal for justice there. The fervent Le Gallais called for a plan to establish a beachhead, unsatisfied with his occasional visits engaging in kitchen Anglicanism in William Gallop’s house. He was worried that the Catholics had a chapel six miles away at Grand River, and there was the ever-present danger of Methodists visiting from Port aux Basques. He wanted a clergyman-schoolmaster stationed at Codroy “to preoccupy the ground, because, by so doing, both Roman Catholics and Dissenters would be excluded.”47 Le Gallais did not obtain his clergyman, but his lay reader, Joseph Galpin, a native of Marnhull, Dorset, agreed to keep school for three years before his death in 1865. Galpin, totally of his own initiative, had brought a book of sermons from England and had assembled people in his house for church services long before Gallais had shown up in Codroy. His successor, Thomas Goode, was able to write an auspicious report in 1873 of the arrival

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to Codroy of a Tractarian schoolmaster “from St Alban’s choir, Manchester … Mr Wilkinson … reads the Church Service twice on Sundays and Holydays, and also Wednesdays and Fridays. He buries the dead, and reads the thanksgivings of women after childbirth, visits the sick, &c … Coming fresh from England, he brightens us up in many things … and if things turn out as we expect, we shall see a large Church population gathered together there fearing the Lord.”48 Zealously fighting Protestantism, Methodism, and revivals in his Port aux Basques mission, Le Gallais was to die in battle, drowned with George Harris and Henry Coleman while returning by boat from visiting the sick at Isle aux Morts. H.W. Tucker drew attention to these fishermen and others who were “always ready, even in the height of the season – their precarious harvest of the season – to take the clergyman in their boats, whatever the distance or weather, without fee or expectation of any.” Le Gallais, written up as a martyr for the cause, was replaced by another ardent clergyman, Thomas Goode, who did not mind being branded with the Methodist epithet of “enthusiast.” He asked what else would motivate a person to “forsake the comforts and endearments” of one’s homeland but a life actuated by the Spirit. “Reality, downright experience proves this Spirit, but to be exact, is too often called fanaticism and wild enthusiasm. If it be enthusiasm it is but that of patriarchs and prophets, of apostles, saints and martyrs, many of whom gloried in the funeral pile!”49 With the service of these two clergyman the Church of England was able to fend off the Methodists. The census of 1869 showed a large increase in population in Port aux Basques and the Anglicans outnumbering Methodists by four to one. In the nearby settlements the Anglicans did even better. When the Methodist missionary James Nurse visited Isle aux Morts in 1874, he found only a man named Troke, who read Wesley’s sermons on Sunday in his house. Each had to contend with the migratory nature of settlement. People came and people went. In the fall of 1873, Goode faced a decrease in his mission when “three small schooners took many families” to Anticosti. The migration also included Methodists who during his ministry surprisingly had become once more “friendly towards the Church.” The Methodists recovered at Port aux Basques to 40 per cent of the population during the 1870s.50 While the Church of England had to contend with Methodists on the western shore, they had free reign on the west coast of Newfoundland. When Wix visited the major town of Sandy Point for a couple of days in the fall of 1830, he reported that Indians, new Scottish immigrants from Cape Breton, French, English, a Quebec merchant, and an American woman made up the population of 361 inhabitants. The Protestants were “all Epis-

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copalians.” This sweeping statement may have to be taken with a grain of salt, since Wix also did not report seeing one Methodist along the whole shore from Harbour Breton to Bay St George. In addition, most of the men at Sandy Point were away hunting caribou. Five years later he spent nearly half of the six months of his “missionary’s inquiry” stationed at Bay St George, with a short jaunt to the Bay of Islands of less than a week. He particularly noted “the marked dissimilarity between the descendants of Jersey-men, Frenchmen, Irish, Scotch and English” in their “dialect, character, and habits.” Although William Bullock, travelling in 1829 with Governor Cochrane, reported “their moral condition is extremely humiliating,” Wix found no immorality and was profuse with examples of stellar character and lifestyle in Bay St George. Living without the appurtenances of either church or state, the settlers at Crabbes (St David’s), “like those of the other settlements, were most industrious, cleanly, moral people.” Forty years later they had not changed.51 One such resident was Thomas Legge, who came out to Newfoundland from Milton Abbas, Dorset, in 1815. He was able to ask the missionary Frederic Hall in the early 1870s to pass on a message to the incumbent of Milton Abbey Church: “‘Tell him I’ve got eleven children and thirty-nine grandchildren; and bless the Lord, not one has been lost to me. If there are any young people who would like to come out they will do well. I’ve been here fifty year and have never wanted bit nor sup; have twenty tons of hay, keep a horse, a few sheep and hogs, and winter thirteen or fourteen head o’ cattle. So you see that old Tom Legge, tho’ money he’s got none, is rich in money’s worth, bless the Lord!’” And his “bless the Lord” was not just a filler for his speech. Hall, writing a year or so later, said that when he hoisted the flag in Crabbes, within a quarter of an hour from the time the bunting has unfurled itself in the breeze, you will see boats making their way across the harbour or along the shore to some landing-place near, and scattered twos and threes of men and women, with their little ones, wending their way … Foremost among the latter you will, at such a time, see the bowed figure of an old man assisting his slow steps with a stick. Under his arm he carries an old and well-thumbed but carefully preserved Prayer-book, given him many years ago by his good bishop … His responses, which come out as readily as his old “aye, aye, sir,” and his reverentially slow but somewhat curious rendering of the words, as he leads his fellow worshippers in the responses, would be sadly missed in the little church at Crabbes Barachoix. But it is when he leads off the Magnificat to the tune which he sang in Milton Abbey Church, in

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Dorset, sixty years since, that Mr Legge shines forth in all his glory … “All pe-a-pul that on arth du dwell,” often rings in my ears … His devotion, his undoubted fervour, only filled me with admiring love and veneration, and perhaps with a feeling of what was so much wanting in my own heart and dwelt so richly in his!52 It is startling to read the initial reports of William Meek, conjointly appointed by the nss and spg, who arrived there in 1841. He wrote shortly after his arrival that he intended to go to the Bay of Islands where he was sent, but it appears he was captured by the “unbounded” kindness of the people of Bay St George. Nevertheless, his verdict was that “in every respect but the name, the place may be considered heathen.” Yet the following year the people at Sandy Point were attending services “beyond my hopes,” and two years later “the Sunday games, and dances, and revels, are gone, and most of the week-day ones too. Our division of the settlement is as quiet and orderly as most English villages.” The editor of the report added that “the change from its barbarous ignorance and vice is of a most remarkable and decided character.” Captain Darley of hms Electra, reflecting on Meek, “most arduous in his pious labours,” marvelled that in two short years Bay St George, as a result of his efforts, “has become a Christian community from having been sunk in heathen darkness.” This is a hardly a restrained comment, since it is speaking of only two changes in the settlement, namely, attending church services and no longer having fun on Sundays. Yet the following year the governor continued to trumpet loudly “the moral and religious improvement of the inhabitants” of Bay St George, that “forsaken and dreary spot.”53 When Feild came by in 1845 he was upbeat about both Meek and Sandy Point. He wrote of Meek as “faithful and zealous.” Although he was an evangelical nss missionary, he was all Feild had. Sandy Point was a “promising settlement,” for though it was without “the benefits of law and civil government” it could look forward to “manifold blessings” from the “happy alliance” of church and school. On his visit three years later, amid his controversy with the nss, he expressed more reserve. Irritated that Meek was away, his announcement of his intended visit having been lost on a wrecked vessel, Feild obliquely accused Meek of lack of industry for not having cultivated the “very profitable” glebe that he had marked out on his first visit. Meek was a reflection of those around him who did “not appear so hardy and laborious” as the people of the rest of Newfoundland. They had not increased their effort to cultivate the land or raise cattle since his first visit, even though the soil and pasture and climate were superior to other settlements on the island. They came mainly “from Canada and the

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United States” to pursue the herring fishery, a “very easy” way of making a living compared to the cod fishery. Many of them were “French Acadians.”54 One has to be cautious about such comments from Feild, since it was difficult for anyone but the English to gain his approval, preferably direct from England. Sandy Point, “the commercial hub” of the bay, was increasing in population as the herring fishery intensified, but not by English and Jersey Protestants, who had predominated at the start. It was a hinterland, not of St John’s, but of Halifax, where the herring was shipped, and from which came “numerous little trading schooners” with “biscuit, flour, and molasses, … pork,” and other wares. But not even the English were passing muster. On his third visit Feild had a sense that “everything seems unsettled” and attributed the atmosphere to “nearly all” the inhabitants being involved in a “very dishonest and wicked” wrecking case in 1847. At Holy Communion he had only six local communicants.55 By 1850 after a decade of church presence at Sandy Point, where there was no winter transhumance, Meek was not able to look back on continued moral improvement, although that was proffered as a large reason for sending missionaries to Newfoundland. Instead, fighting, Sabbath-breaking, swearing, and drunkenness were worse than ever. They were too independent. “They can not, and will not, bear restraint.” They were “accustomed to shoot and fish, and idle away the Sabbath, to swear and to riot away their time, and to do just as they please in every sense, without anyone ever calling them to account.” While having a “low, degraded, immoral character,” they had a “fondness for external appearances.” Women were sporting “white veils and parasols,” even while working at the herring.56 And they were dancing. There appeared to be some progress when, under his preaching, “the chief fiddler … at the dances” renounced his music. But Meek was ready to throw up his hands on New Year’s Eve, when after he “had preached the most solemn and pointed sermon” he could deliver, the people walked out of the church and straight to a New Year’s dance. There they with “Indians, Acadians, and French” enjoyed a great night of happiness celebrating the beginning of the New Year.57 The English population had decreased to 200. Meek resorted to blaming the decline in numbers and morals on the absence of state apparatus and the migratory nature of the people. “There is no prospect of much increase, the place is so solitary, so unsettled, so unprotected, so lawless, that no one seems to be satisfied to remain long in it.” Neither was he, for a couple of years later he left. Feild said that he “deserted” the mission.58 In 1852 Meek left for Prince Edward Island. It is likely that in addition to Meek’s despondency with the spiritual state of Sandy Point and its proximity to Prince Edward Island, his evangelical Anglicanism was a large fac-

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tor in his leaving Newfoundland altogether. His reports show a focus on Protestant conversion from preaching “the unvarying testimony … of Jesus Christ alone whereby they must be saved” and a total absence of emphasis on sacramental Christianity and its attendant Gothic architecture and Tractarian apparatus of chancel, altar, and weekly Eucharist, as there was, for example, in those from Le Gallais at Port aux Basques. Meek subscribed to the London Record, so he was no comrade of Bishop Feild, but it did not really matter. Being at the western extremity of the Newfoundland mission, he rarely saw Feild or any of his clergymen, and thus was largely beyond any Tractarian influence. He saw Feild only twice in a decade while he was at his mission, and he never had to deal daily with the countervailing focus of a Tractarian priest as, for example, Dyer did with Julian Moreton at Greenspond.59 He reflected that at Sandy Point he was not involved in the “many painful controversies agitating the Church.” It is likely that it was through an extended article in the Record that he learned that Feild had washed his hands of the nss in 1848. It was followed by a letter from the editor stating that, through Feild and Bridge, Tractarianism was even more entrenched in Newfoundland than he had ever suspected. The editor could hardly believe that Bridge had stated, “‘I sincerely declare that I know what is meant by the Protestant Church’!” and further, “‘that in the Reformed Church the Real Presence in the Sacrament was always taught’!” The editor was aghast that the nss had ever permitted Bishop Feild to be its superintendent in Newfoundland, but now that he had resigned, it could at least get back to its “scriptural foundations.”60 The following year Meek wrote that he continued to hear of “great conflicts in the Church,” and again it was likely through the Record, which printed more articles that found Feild’s Tractarianism reprehensible. It spoke of Tractarianism as “the corrupting evil which now overspreads the colony” and dissected Feild’s 1844, 1845, and 1847 Charges to the Clergy to show how horribly soaked in the ism he really was.61 Boland and his wife, the two “members of a Dissenting Congregation, and … married in a Dissenting Chapel by a Dissenting Minister,” replaced Meek, hardly a firebrand for Tractarianism in Bay St George. He was able to improve the situation by dealing with “the contentions and combats for which Sandy Point was once too notorious.”62 Though Feild was not too complimentary to Boland in the beginning, writing, “I have rarely met with a more discontented disagreeable person,” this was not his last word. At Boland’s ordination to the priesthood at Trinity, Feild stated that his “learning, especially on controversial points, is very considerable.” The dean of Lichfield judged that he was “a man of considerable powers of mind,

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8.1 Death of Thomas Boland

thoughtful, accurate, careful.” Boland served at Sandy Point and gave the ultimate sacrifice. Returning across Flat Bay from visiting a parishioner in March, he was frozen to death on the ice within a mile of his home. Duncan McLean, a local settler, one of the men who found him the next day, said he was travelling at night and became lost in the drifting snow and “‘must hae purposely walked up-and-doun the best part of the night, for the skin was off his heels, and he socks were clean froze wi’ bluid to ’em. Ay, but he was a fine braw mon, and must hae had a hard struggle.’” The Church Society report called him an “excellent and valuable Missionary,” and the spg said he “set a good example of death bravely encountered for Christ’s sake.” Even the Colonial Church Chronicle named him with Bridge and Mountain, saying that “each of these good men has fallen at his post, in the prime of life.” F.G. Hall, who served at Sandy Point and returned to St Augustine’s, Canterbury, stated that Boland’s “memory as truly deserves to be cherished, as do the names one-half the heroes and martyrs of the past.” The people of Sandy Point also appreciated his ministry, and in his memory erected a marble headstone and later placed a stained-glass window in the church in his honour.63 Henry Lind had a rough ending to his ministry of over fifteen years at Heart’s Content. He was accused of “criminal intercourse” with a married woman. Though he was not convicted, the people thought he was guilty and “barred him from the church.” Feild thought he was innocent and noted that he had “some bitter and unscrupulous enemies” in the mission, but did not state why these people were so upset with him. He sent Lind to

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Sandy Point, a priest in full orders on the frontier.64 Lind had come to Newfoundland as an evangelical nss teacher in 1829, then was made a deacon by Bishop Spencer. He held Bishop Feild in high regard, calling him “our excellent Bishop,” but still did not stray from the Reformation gospel, for in 1853 he was still preaching “the merits of Jesus the Saviour of Sinners … the imputed righteousness of Christ,” and he participated minimally in Tractarian church culture. Two days after his arrival at Sandy Point he started a singing group in church which did include chanting, but he served Holy Communion once a month, instead of weekly, as Le Gallais did at Port aux Basques, of whom he was “very fond.” The only church furniture he noted was a collection for a new pulpit and reading desk.65 While he collected for the Church Society, he never mentioned anything about ten shillings being required by the bishop. Neither did he indicate that he pressed people to pay, or that he was concerned if they did not.66 It is clear from his Sandy Point journal that, contrary to his bishop, Lind continued his evangelical Anglican focus on the gospel. While noting baptism as part of his routine, he focused on the religion of the heart in his visitation and in his preaching. Several times while visiting he told individuals of the “gospel plan of salvation,” such as a woman at Middle Barachoix who was “penitent” about having a child out of wedlock. Similarly he saw the sum of his preaching before God as proclaiming “thy Gospel … the way of Salvation thro’ a crucified Saviour.” Both Lind and Meek also ignored Bishop Feild’s charge to his clergy to observe saints’ days, a command that was to be “punctually obeyed.”67 Lind reported in 1868 that people “still shrink from communicating,” even at the monthly Holy Communion service. Thus, it was evangelical Anglicanism that was promulgated in Bay St George and prevailed at Sandy Point, albeit, towards the end of Lind’s ministry, in a more Gothic setting of chancel, arched ceiling, and rearranged seating.68

bay of islands When Wix travelled from St John’s to the Bay of Islands in 1835 for six months to promote the need for “missionaries and schools,” it was only at the latter, at the western end of his tour, that he found such “horrible enormities” of immorality that he declined to write them in his journal. In his published journal of the voyage, Six Months, he did include “Shocking Depravity of Females” of the Bay of Islands, which entailed drunkenness, pipe-smoking, profanity, and “instances of adulterous and incestuous connections with which I am unwilling to pollute my journal.” Wix went on to state the purpose of noting “such horrible enormities,” which was the necessity for “missionaries and schools [to] be multiplied in the island.”

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The account stands out precisely because of its marked contrast with his description of the people he found everywhere else on his tour. Yet this is the very section that the spg fastened on to publish in its Report for 1836, with more pages added in the appendix. The editor, without pointing out that the instance in the journal was anomalous, attempted to mollify the shock to his readers by adding, “It is certain that these remarks will apply to many places besides Newfoundland.”69 The report, sent throughout the empire, became part of the “sunk into utter spiritual vacancy” trope used to motivate people to donate or to come to Newfoundland as missionaries.70 Instead, what really was happening in the mission was a competition with the Methodists. On the south coast they already had Grand Bank and Fortune, two of the most prominent and prosperous towns on the coast, and there was an urgency to beat them to the punch on the rest of the south coast and to the west. Yet Wix, calling out for missionaries, did not himself attempt to come to their rescue and instead returned to Bay St George, where he spent most of the summer. His evasion was eclipsed only by the first missionary sent there, William Meek. Bishop Spencer, having read Wix’s published journal, or the Bay of Islands section of it published in the spg Report for 1836, was prompted to send a missionary there in 1841, writing that it was “in a state of savage ignorance, and I fear, immorality.”71 But not only Bishop Spencer was shocked into action. A “valued friend” donated fifty pounds specifically towards funding a missionary for that bay in particular.72 Paid for conjointly by the spg and nss, Meek set out for the Bay of Islands. He did not have to depend on a vessel going in that direction, for he was given a charter directly. Despite all the tender care, he became so enamoured with Bay St George on the way that he decided to serve there instead and terminated his voyage before he reached his destination. The red flag of immorality waved before the British public since the time of Wix as the urgent reason to send missionaries to Newfoundland was totally ignored. It is difficult to believe how both the spg and nss could have retained credibility while brushing aside the pressing solicitation so graphically described and so geographically specific. Meek at Bay St George did admit that Bishop Spencer sent him to the Bay of Islands because of its “pre-eminent depravity.” Disobeying the order and ignoring the convenience of a chartered vessel, he later excused himself by saying that he hoped to visit there later when he could get a boat going that way. He acknowledged that “some lady in England” gave the money for the Bay of Islands, but hoped she would support Bay St George instead.73 Although Wix had sounded his moral alarm over the “horrible enormities” in the Bay of Islands, Bishop Feild did not sail the few extra leagues to go there in 1845, and instead terminated his first nautical venture at Bay St

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George. On his next voyage in 1848 he actually passed it by on his way to Labrador after his second visit to Bay St George. Yet he continued the moral alarm sounded by Wix: “Twenty families are reported to be living there in a state worse than heathenism.” Missionary periodicals, such as the Mission Field and the Parochial Missionary Magazine, picked up Feild’s account of degeneration, saying that “the moral state of the people is most degraded” in the bay.74 The next year, having visited Sandy Point the third time, Feild finally entered the Bay of Islands, fortified with four clergymen to face whatever was to be faced. Remarkably, the arrant immorality that Wix had noised abroad was nowhere to be found. It had disappeared without the help of a single missionary. He did find “a Frenchman named Prosper Companion” from St Pierre living “all by himself” with his family at Frenchman’s Cove. He “is, or was, a Roman Catholic,” but his wife requested that Feild baptize her four children, which he did. She had been living by herself, as her husband had been engaged elsewhere in the salmon fishery for two months. Within the bay he found several sons of Ralph Brake from Dorset who settled near the mouth of the Humber River in the late 1700s. One of them, Edward Brake, his wife, children, and brother were all living industriously, faithfully, and peaceably at the homestead. Having demonstrated his spirituality by privately baptizing his children, Edward then asked Feild to baptize them as a clergyman. Another son lived at Tucker’s Cove with his wife, “a Micmac Indian from St George’s Bay” who could recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed “with other prayers.” They had their four children rebaptized. At Gillams an “old patriarch” named Blanchard, living there since about 1780, welcomed them and spoke fondly of the visit of Wix. At the house also was a young man named Lorder who had also come from Dorset as a servant of one of the Brakes. He was “married and settled,” and when he realized that Feild was not a trader coming to buy his salt fish, rowed fifteen miles to get his children and bring them for baptism. At Brooks’ Cove he met another “old Englishman” and his family, but they were not as spiritually inclined as the other settlers, since “none of their good things were sanctified by the word of God and prayer.” At McIver’s there was a settler named Park from Burin with his wife, “an Indian from Burgeo.” Feild’s local pilot, Thomas Beverly, fished with them during the summer and moved to Harbour Island “to make hoops” with his brother during the winter. At Deep Cove, “another settlement of Brakes,” he met another man from Dorset named Crocker who had married their sister. He had been in Newfoundland for “many years” and was the first settler at Trout River, near Bonne Bay, where with their nine children they grew vegetables and raised “many sheep and pigs.” There were three fami-

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lies, two by the names of Bailey and Wheller, engaged in a summer fishery at Lark Harbour. Feild had a service in one of their “little temporary cabins” and the people “devoutly” took part. One “poor ragged fisherman” knelt down and read from the Prayer Book during the responses, “the only instance” in the bay. Instead of finding “heathenism” and having to deliver comminations, or even discovering spiritual indifference on his first visit to the Bay of Islands, Feild encountered people going about their work of making a living, and happy that clergymen came to baptize their children.75 They made use of their services, possibly after the clergymen’s urgent persuasion, not sure that the spiritual measures they had previously taken were adequate. In rebaptizing children who had been privately baptized by Anglican parents or by even Roman Catholic clergy, Feild said that they required “hypothetical baptism,” which was meant to make up for whatever was inadequate on the first try. Being of a Tractarian bent, and having four clergymen wandering about the bay, three “in full orders” who could baptize, it is no wonder that they baptized whomever they could find remotely eligible, baptized before or not. Feild found no instances of “vice and brutality” that the Colonial Church Chronicle said prevailed in the bay.76 What he did discover was beautiful landscape on which he waxed long and wished for the “ability” to do so more eloquently. Thus, the Bay of Islands became the place of exceptional scenery instead of flagrant immorality in the clerical record. During the misty morning, “magnificent hills” with clouds at their summits “had a very majestic appearance.” At the entrance to the bay “the scenery is the most bold and picturesque I have ever seen in my voyage.” At the head of the bay near the mouth of the Humber River, Feild was at a loss for words, for he “never saw any scenery … nearly so picturesque in Newfoundland, or perhaps, I might say, anywhere.”77 Feild’s Tractarian romanticism was met by that of nature, excelling, to his wonderment, his fondly remembered banks of the Wye.78 And the subject of immorality in the Bay of Islands was dropped, without explanation. Feild returned in 1855 and stayed for four days, visiting “the families scattered on either side of Humber Sound, in picturesque and fertile coves.” The only family he gave any detail about lived “some distance” from Lark Harbour, and, once again, far from being immoral, they stood out as an example to all. The father, “an Englishman, well educated, and apparently bringing up his children carefully and religiously,” had taught some of his six children to read, and desired more books.79 In 1859 Feild was back again baptizing and marrying, and though he spoke of the people as “destitute and forsaken” by the Church of England, they seemed to be getting along well and nothing was out of hand, except for one instance.

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Bishop Feild was almost ready to throw up his hands during a kitchenAnglican experience at McIver’s, when he found that he had another dog incident on his hands. But this time the dog was not “thrown out,” as Chrysostom had been in the church at Bay Roberts, so he found it difficult to maintain Church of England “order” on the frontier. Actually, he seemed both frustrated and amused: “I believe if my discourse had been in Latin, it would have been as much, perhaps more, attended to. The old woman began to talk to Mr Johnson’s little boy, interrupting her own discourse and mine by occasionally telling the dog to ‘jump out,’ a command which from her, but her only, was always obeyed; obeyed but soon forgotten; for presently the dog had jumped in again. The old man called for a match to light his pipe with, and it was only by preventing his wish being complied with, that I could engage his attention.”80 It was fortunate that the settlers of the Bay of Islands were of a stout spiritual and independent character, for it was not until thirty years after Wix that a missionary was finally sent to the Bay of Islands. They were joined in the early 1860s by others migrating from both Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, especially from Cape Breton. Though Presbyterian, they were eager for Bishop Feild to provide a clergyman to them, which he did in the person of Ulrich Zwinglius Rule in 1865.81 Rule was a composite of evangelical and Tractarian Anglicanism, and Methodism. His father was a Methodist preacher, and he attended both Methodist and Anglican Sunday services until the time of his departure from England. But he preferred the “reverence” of the Church of England, and no doubt his Tractarian inclination was further bent by his association with George Hutchinson at Battle Harbour, Bishop Feild, Charles Medley, the son of the Bishop of Fredericton at St John’s, and the ardent W.W. Le Gallais at Port aux Basques.82 He certainly strayed far from the spontaneous spirituality of Methodism. While travelling overland in winter from the Bay of Islands to Sandy Point with a group of men, “under the guidance of an Indian whom they called Louis,” rather than engage in extemporaneous prayer before turning in for the night, he took great pains to read from a prayer book. The party had no candles, so “one of my companions burnt a bit of pork fat, stuck on a skewer, which he held so as to throw light on my book.” However, when he held services “in dwelling houses, that is, in kitchens,” he also strayed from following his bishop’s “order and uniformity”: “I used to read the Morning or Evening Service, using the appointed psalms and lessons; but I afterwards came to adopt the plan of reading simple passages of Scripture of my own selection, and one or two psalms of my own selection, when the psalms of the day were not suitable to the people’s apprehension. I also ab-

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breviate the prayers.” Of course, he regularly held church services in very un-Gothic settings, namely in a log house at Birchy Cove (Curling), in a school-chapel at John’s Beach, and in a house at Meadows, and did not seem to pine for structures of more architectural resemblance of the Tractarian ideal. Neither did the people. But they appreciated having a clergyman among them, especially one with a “heart full of zeal” who stayed in “a miserable shed,” and they showed him much care and affection. Some were not into kneeling, but on that matter Rule did draw the line. A year before he left the mission, a church was finally built with the help of £300 from Miss Lempriere of Jersey, at least the second woman to donate to the mission in the Bay of Islands.83 It was Rule’s successor, Joseph Curling, who took the Tractarian torch on the west coast from W. Le Gallais and held it high for any who wanted to follow. Curling, a rich lieutenant in the Royal Engineers was a larger-thanlife figure who “drank life to the lees” as he travelled throughout the Mediterranean, entertained lavishly, and jaunted about on his seventy-twoton yacht, Lavrock. A member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, “that highly aristocratic and exclusive Club,” what he really thirsted for was adventure. For instance, he canoed across the English Channel and also wanted to take part in an expedition to the North Pole. Not quite fulfilling that dream, he did make it to Bermuda, bought another yacht, and “was a great deal on the water.” There he met Bishop Feild, also wintering in Bermuda, “with whom he found himself in complete accord in matters spiritual, ecclesiastical, and nautical.” He immediately “gave liberally” towards completing the Most Holy Trinity Cathedral at Hamilton, had an organ built for it in England, and funded an organist from across the Atlantic. Upon his return to England he handed over the Lavrock to Feild, but not before he converted the yacht into a proper church ship “with an altar, vestments, surplices, and all possible requisites.” Romantic that he was, and wanting something deeper than his lavish lifestyle offered, he volunteered to be a missionary for what he perceived to be a “wild and desolate region,” the Bay of Islands and Bonne Bay in Newfoundland.84 It was at Birchy Cove that Curling built a replacement for Rule’s church. The new church, a singular work that he designed in proper ecclesiological style, was an elaborate Gothic affair in wood. It had a central tower with a spire, as was planned for the cathedral at St John’s, transepts, choir chamber, and a centre aisle leading up to a chancel that was a Tractarian’s dream with raised altar and an east window of “Powell’s glass, oak stalls, lamps and hangings.”85 It is difficult to determine how the people responded to this Tractarian largesse. In addition to the original families, such as the Brakes, others had migrated in significant numbers from different parts of the is-

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8.2 Bonne Bay

land, such as from St John’s and Carbonear, to engage in the winter herring fishery. Roman Catholics and Anglicans were about equally divided, and there were a few Methodists and Presbyterians.86 They did admire Curling, not so much for his brand of Anglicanism as for his prowess as a navigator and for his “pluck, energy, and independence of character.” And he was a man of means who was not forever begging for their ten shillings but instead was generous “in giving window sashes, iron work, nails, etc.” as they built schools, which he then furnished with schoolmasters. His “tramp in snow-shoes” from Channel to Birchy Cove during his first winter in the mission also “raised him immensely in the estimation of the fisherfolk, who promptly decided that ‘Parson Curling’ was one of the right sort.”87

bonne bay Feild stopped at Trout River in 1849 on the way to Bonne Bay to visit the Crockers, who lived there with “some Blanchards and Brakes from the Bay of Islands.” Crocker appeared to be in a comfortable situation with his farming and fishing, but Feild reported that still he “grumbles like an Englishman.” This first visit of the Anglican clergy was carried out with much Tractarian flair, at least with as much as Feild could manage on the fly. The three baptizers were arrayed in their surplices. Feild was rowed ashore with his “portable font,” communion table, and its “usual ornamental covering.” Crocker had already baptized eight of his children, but at the request of his wife they baptized them all over again, as well as the remaining one, and “three of John Brake’s, the widower.” The visit must have been quite an event

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at Trout River, with the Hawk “standing on and off” for the duration. As at the Bay of Islands, the people were devout during the ceremony and either did not take notice of, or take exception to, the Tractarian embellishments. At Rocky Harbour Feild found “an old Englishman,” John Paine, and his wife, the only woman on the shore who had immigrated directly from England. They had been married at St John’s by John Harris, who had moved there from Placentia Bay, came to Rocky Harbour, and had “seen two generations grow up around him.” Feild held two services ashore, rebaptized their children, and after addressing the people and having “much conversation” with them, concluded they were “very earnest and serious.” Paine, who could read, showed his Prayer Book and New Manual of Devotions, which Feild noticed were “well used,” the latter was so “well used” that Paine wanted another. This was certainly a mark of earnest Church of England spirituality. Feild stood in greater wonder before John Paine than he felt when he first encountered the “most bold and picturesque” scenery in the Bay of Islands. In referencing him five years later, he still spoke of the influence of “the prudence and piety of one well-disposed and religiously-educated man.” The clergy as they stood there in their surplices must have felt a little superfluous before this pillar of spiritual strength. Neither had he ever been paid a farthing for his services, nor expected one. The New Manual he requested was for those who went beyond the Prayer Book in their devotion. It included prayers for each day of the week, morning and evening, for one’s family, for self-examination, for the sick, for the conversion of a sinner, and for a multitude of specific circumstances of life such as times of travel, war, poverty, temptation, storm, and debt. Nothing escaped Feild’s eye. Before he left, he even “examined the garden.”88 He also examined John Paine, in particular his baptizing and marrying, whether it was “meet and right so to do.” Paine later wrote a letter to Julian Moreton, who was with Feild on his 1849 voyage, and asked him whether the bishop intended to send “a Rovin Minister,” as the people were too scattered to have a “sated [seated] one.” If the bishop was not going to send one, should he continue baptizing and marrying? Feild did not have a clergyman to send to Bonne Bay, and not knowing how to institute “order and uniformity” on the frontier, took the unusual step of asking the editor of the Colonial Church Chronicle for advice, and also for suggestions from its readers. The editor did not reply, at least publicly, but he did note that the New York Church Journal copied Feild’s letter on 7 December 1854, and one of its correspondents wrote that Feild should ordain Paine a deacon, and the editor of the Church Journal agreed.89 It was advice that Feild refused to follow when he returned to Bonne Bay in 1855. Yet he found again

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a well-ordered lay-church ministry at Rocky Harbour led by Paine, the patriarch of the eighty-two-member extended family making up the whole population. Without help of bishop or clergy, except by the encouragement of the 1849 visit, John Paine had held morning and evening church services, baptized, buried, and married “for upwards of fifty years.”90 Feild sailed into Bonne Bay itself for the first time in 1863, having visited only Rocky Harbour at the entrance previously. Le Gallais, who accompanied him on the voyage, found six members of his flock from the Port aux Basques mission who had helped increase the population from four or five to fourteen families.91 Ulrich Rule, who first visited in 1865, made Woody Point the centre of his mission, and one of the settlers, Solomon Wilton, welcomed him to stay in his house. They were all Church of England, “except of a very few of no religion at all,” and met first in a house, then in a school-chapel. They were Protestants, depending primarily on a spirituality of the Word and not the sacrament. When Rule excitedly looked forward to his first Holy Communion in Bonne Bay in 1866, he noted, “There will be but few communicants,” but he hoped that with Feild’s visit and confirmation the following year the number would increase. During his tenure, Rule was amazed to see the population increase from 18 families to 120. Bonne Bay was transformed by this influx, mainly as the result of a winter herring fishery that attracted fishermen from Nova Scotia and many summer migratory Labrador fishermen from Conception Bay and the northeast coast to settle in the area. So Rule suddenly found that he had “a good many Methodists” in the midst of his mission. He was particularly worried about one family that had been converted since coming to Bonne Bay. Curling, who followed Rule, had to contend with an enormous increase in Methodists from 28 to 270 in the five years from 1869 to 1874. Likely this increase was a major reason that Feild wanted a clergyman in the mission in 1873 before Curling’s arrival. Feild saw the situation so urgent that placing Edward Botwood there for the summer was “one chief object” of his sailing to the West Coast that year on his last voyage. A writer who accompanied him was keenly aware that the Methodists were continuing to increase on the northeast coast because they took advantage of the “lack of clergy” in Notre Dame Bay and elsewhere. When Curling did arrive, the chapel that he completed in Bonne Bay was a humble attempt showing that, unlike Rule who continually halted between two opinions, he decisively chose Birchy Cove as head of the mission.92 Methodism taking root in Bonne Bay instead of in the Bay of Islands may have been a large part of that decision. In conclusion, while Burgeo showed promise for the Methodists, partly due to the migratory fishermen from Grand Bank and Fortune, Bishop

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Spencer outmanoeuvred them in sending a clergyman there in 1842. Blackmore was able to take advantage of Methodist gains and establish a Protestant Anglican ministry based on the scriptures and such books as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Remaining Methodists continued to fellowship in their winter quarters with others in La Poile Bay. Bishop Feild was able to introduce Gothic architecture to Burgeo itself, but it would have been a Protestant kitchen Anglicanism of the Prayer Book that prevailed elsewhere along the coast, where just two or three families lived in the harbours and coves. While Spencer took Burgeo, it was Feild who gained Port aux Basques, stealthily acquiring the church built by a variety of Protestants for fifty pounds. With his ardent priest, Wellmein Le Gallais, a man after his own heart, Tractarianism reigned supreme. The Methodists pushed back with the Temperance Movement and revivals, but solemnity prevailed. Further west, without a Le Gallais, but instead with former teachers of the Newfoundland School Society, Feild had no success with his Tractarian program, even without the challenge of Methodists. He had little leverage over the nss Anglicanism, since Sandy Point was out of range to exercise continuous oversight. Furthermore, the diversity of Sandy Point did not take to a vision of uniformity. Feild was much more successful in the Bay of Islands when he finally turned the nose of the Hawk into the bay. It was not at all the bay of immorality that it was written up to be, and he was fortunate in having Ulrich Rule and Joseph Curling to press his Tractarian program, especially the latter who built the Gothic St Mary the Virgin. In contrast, Bonne Bay, which held such promise with the devout John Paine, and the Crockers next door, did not fall in line with the uniformity of Tractarianism, as Feild had hoped. Methodist immigrants from Conception Bay and elsewhere caused further wreckage. He was also foiled by the residents of Cow Head who did not show much promise either. As Ulrich Rule said of them, “It seemed to me that my visits were not valued by the people. Perhaps I did not understand them.”93 Thus Birchy Cove received one of the few Tractarian steeples and spires on which the sun set in western Newfoundland.

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8 Conclusion The wind continued to blow, and the sea to rage and swell all night; and the rolling and dashing of the waves against the side of the vessel were so incessant and violent that I could hardly remain in my berth. At two o’clock the vessel was put about, when I heard such a banging and thumping of the rudder, that I ran on deck to ascertain the cause. I found the wheel deserted, there being only two men on deck, and both engaged in hauling round the yards. I took the wheel, in night-shirt and night-cap only, without shoe or slipper, till the yards were round … I turned in again till six o’clock … We beat into Lark Harbour against a violent head-wind, and did not get to anchor till ten o’clock. [Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 36

Feild may not have succeeded in making people more spiritual, but he sought to make their spirituality more dependent on church and clergy. His priests attempted to engross a diffusive popular spirituality by elevating the sacraments, and themselves with them. He obtruded himself into people’s religious sphere by disparaging lay baptism, even priestly baptism in private homes, and by arguing for apostolic baptism exclusively in church with the congregation looking on. Similarly his focus was on the sacramental salvation of the Real Presence, over which he and the clergy officiated in the chancel. This was his new gospel. His Anglicanism was primarily a “God in His house” religion. And in that Gothic box the priest was king. It was his incubator in which to foster Tractarian Anglicanism in an atmosphere of solemnity. With font and altar as his main implements, he interposed himself and the clergy between the people and their God and continued to work and to warn so as to make himself indispensable in their spirituality. The attempt was thus to remove from their lives the Christ they spoke of, to a place beyond the vaulted ceiling and its steeple, and in his place to posit a priest. However, as Feild noted, when he pressed hard with his Tractarianism he drove many from the Church of England to Methodism.1 It was Methodism, not Roman Catholicism, that was his exogenous competitor. Method-

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ism held out confident communion with God through ecstasy, while Feild offered a more tenuous communion with God through sacramental solemnity.2 Feild offered a union of the soul with God through a priesthood housed in Gothic while with the Methodists it was a democratic affair, offered to each other when people gathered in kitchens, churches, or schooners, and sometimes offered alone when individuals had only the sky above their heads. It is true there was some bleeding to Catholicism, but not often. It occurred sometimes when neither an Anglican Church presence nor Methodism was available to the people. Neither was it all about spirituality, for in Newfoundland most Catholics were Irish, and to most English, except in love and marriage, that was an impossible divide. They maintained their neighbourliness by building good fences. Thus Joseph Osmond at Seal Cove lived “on very good terms” with his Roman Catholic neighbours along the shore at Lobster Cove. “‘There was never a thee, or a thou, passed between them.’” Feild himself, after twenty years of observation, said, “Except at the elections, and then only in a few districts, I am not aware of any bitter or unkind feeling shown, or entertained, by the Roman Catholics towards their Protestant fellow-colonists.”3 It is Feild’s twofold advantage of clarity of mission as a Tractarian and empire-builder and of love for the sea in ministering to a coastal people that brings into relief the popular religion and culture of nineteenth-century Newfoundland and Labrador: his single-mindedness because it reveals the reaction of an unsuspecting people to his surprise arrival and mission, and his nautical prowess and love of the sea because his extensive visitation cast a spotlight on the whole of Newfoundland and southern Labrador, and not just the Avalon. The first opposition to Feild was in St John’s, a rebuff that appears to have startled him, as he attempted to unburden his Tractarianism so soon upon his arrival, almost as he stepped onto the pier. While reaction at St John’s Church was immediate and explosive, resistance continued at every turn for decades at St Thomas’s, where the people did extend a hand of greeting, but kept the other behind their backs. While he agitated his fellow Anglicans, Feild also inflamed Protestants in general through his rejection of their ecumenical efforts, and Catholics in particular through his attempt to siphon poor-relief fire funds to build his cathedral. Feild fared even worse in Conception Bay in Newfoundland’s second town, Harbour Grace. He disdained their evangelical Anglicanism and they disdained him, and the feud against his “order and uniformity” continued to the end of his episcopate. Even with the Anglicans of Brigus, Feild had a checkered success, the nadir of which may have been the time Captain Abram Bartlett stepped out of his pew, walked to the front of the church, and gutted the chancel, throwing out every Tractarian vestige that he saw in

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it. Shortly after Feild’s death, many in inner Conception Bay and Trinity Bay deserted the result of his life-long effort altogether and joined the new “Reformed Church of England” – pointedly Protestant in all its ways. Their resistance mirrored that of John Roberts and the people of Grates Cove and Bay de Verde at the other extremity of Conception Bay and at the very beginning of his episcopate. As for the Methodists, who were the majority of the Protestants of Conception Bay, Feild was unable to breach their fortress. Therefore the whole of Conception Bay, not just Brigus was, to quote Robert H. Taylor, a “wild desert of Puritanism.” To Feild and his fellow Tractarians, their refusal to conform was in its essence the nature of “the Great Rebellion” – the disobedience against church and state in the English Civil War. Their opposition further prolonged that “evil time” when “perverse and self-righteous men” thought it right “to introduce their own conceits, and fancied improvements” instead of following the directives of their bishops.4 There was further resistance to Bishop Feild in Placentia Bay to the south. Feild caused a firestorm when he sent his clergyman William Kepple White to Harbour Buffett in the middle of the bay. The recently settled community had a strong evangelical presence that had been cultivated by the Newfoundland School Society and Methodists. Sound Island would have nothing whatever to do with Feild and his Tractarian clergyman and, with the exception of two individuals, rejected their Gothic spirituality en masse and chose Methodism instead. Feild also drove a Tractarian wedge into the ecumenical Protestantism of Burin, the major centre of Placentia Bay, where Anglicans and Methodists had fellowshipped together to such a degree that they were hardly distinguishable. He drove the wedge so deep that Anglicans, who outnumbered the Methodists upon his arrival, rejected his Tractarianism in large numbers, and by the end of his episcopacy Methodists outnumbered Anglicans by three to one, although in the remainder of the south coast Feild was largely able to retain Anglican members. He wanted to make an assault on the Methodist town of Grand Bank but gave up on the idea. At Harbour Breton, another major centre, he successively placed two ardent Tractarian clergymen who followed his every wish for practically his whole tenure. The district was so large, however, that people adhered to the Anglicanism of their choice. At nearby Belleoram a former nss deacon was friendly to the bishop but preached an evangelical Anglicanism embraced by the people. The Methodists lost early gains at Hermitage and Burgeo as the result of inept planning and because there was a strong Anglican clerical presence, especially at the latter. Still, Martin Blackmore, appointed by Bishop Spencer, continued to preach evangelical Anglicanism at Burgeo while making a Gothic accommodation to Feild’s wishes. Further west at La Poile, Feild had only a former Baptist, Thomas Appleby,

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to raise the Anglican flag. Nearby, the Methodists were able to retain Garia and Petites largely due to migration from Grand Bank. But they lost out to Feild at Port aux Basques, where Feild was able to temporarily vanquish an ecumenical Protestantism, which included Nova Scotians, through his ardent Tractarian clergyman W.W. Le Gallais. The Methodists rebounded in full force, only to fade again. The Anglicans on the west coast at Bay St George, Bay of Islands, and Bonne Bay, and clergymen at the first were left largely on their own. William Meek at Sandy Point and Henry Lind were both former nss teachers who were evangelical in their outlook in a diverse migratory population among whom were English, Irish, Scot, Jerseymen, French, Nova Scotian, American, Quebecer, and Mi’kmaq. In both the Bay of Islands and Bonne Bay the people were left to practise whatever Anglicanism they chose until Ulrich Rule, who grew up a Methodist, arrived quite late in Feild’s tenure, 1865. While migratory Methodists had success in Bonne Bay, Joseph Curling focused on bringing Tractarianism to the Bay of Islands with his Gothic St Mary the Virgin at Birchy Cove. Feild made and maintained a muscular effort to introduce and fortify Tractarianism in Labrador, but with no great success. With Gothic churches in Forteau and Battle Harbour to reinforce an appearance and a hope of permanency, Feild desperately needed long-term Tractarian clergymen to officiate in them and minister to the people. At Forteau he had a semblance of one in Algernon Gifford, but a decade after he left, the centre for the mission was moved across the strait, and what had seemed so full of promise was no more. Red Bay just had too many Methodists, permanent and migratory, especially from Conception Bay, as did Henley Harbour and Chateau Bay, to make headway. Sandwich Bay never got past an aspiration. Battle Harbour alone, with a Grey church, a supportive English merchant, and a dedicated romantic in the person of George Hutchinson, seemed to be the greatest prospect for a Tractarian citadel on the Labrador coast. But progress was difficult. The society of migratory fishermen and settlers was too pluralistic. The Congregationalists spread their democratic spirituality along the coast in person and through myriad books and tracts. There were Methodists everywhere with their vernacular spirituality, which sprouted up ubiquitously in harbours and coves in kitchens and on decks of vessels. They mixed with the democratic and free-spirited Americans who were numerous on the coast, not to speak of Nova Scotians. It was no environment to foster a hierarchical, priestly spirituality, and certainly no place for uniformity. But Feild’s worst defeat was on the northeast coast. While leaving Herring Neck, he was alarmed to hear several bumps and thought he was “against

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the rocks,” but going out on deck found instead that after dragging over them, “the good Church ship’s anchor was lost.”5 Likewise, his episcopal project was set adrift in Notre Dame Bay. Nowhere else did people in such large numbers reject his spirituality of solemnity, choosing instead the ecstasy of Methodism. They shut their doors to the vicarious religion of a Tractarian priest, and raised their own hands to heaven, boldly asserting that they themselves would take responsibility for their spirituality. Those who remained largely ignored Bishop Feild and staunchly maintained their Protestant spirituality, such as at St Peter’s Church, Twillingate. Others, such as at Greenspond in Bonavista Bay, partially accommodated Feild’s Tractarianism, but still negotiated a Protestant Anglicanism, nurtured by nss teacher and deacon Robert Dyer. By the end of his episcopate Feild could see a few Gothic churches on his northeast coast map, but his Tractarian project was a muted effort, like smoking wicks from altar candles lit in vain. The lamps of Methodism were shining all about. It is true that during Feild’s tenure a substantial Gothic footprint was left in parts of Newfoundland. What was its significance for his Tractarian mission? Does the presence of material Gothic indicate its success? First of all, there is a great difference in the intended spiritual and theological significance between generally Gothic and ecclesiologically correct Gothic churches. The latter, with the internal architecture of center aisle, chancel, and raised altar, was the special desire of Tractarians, for Gothic architecture was by no means exclusive to Tractarians. It was a Gothic cathedral, although to Tractarians it was a “sham,” that the evangelical Spencer planned to build before Feild’s arrival. Similarly, “the earliest Gothic Anglican church still extant in Newfoundland” is St Paul’s in Harbour Grace, the home of evangelical Protestants that they began in 1835. Their Gothicism was followed a year later by the evangelicals of St Thomas’s in St John’s.6 Similarly, in Nova Scotia the very first Gothic vocabulary was articulated not by Tractarians but by Loyalist Anglicans a half-century earlier in 1793, and the next-earliest was that of a Baptist congregation of Goat Island, also in the Annapolis Basin.7 Kalman in his History of Canadian Architecture called this pre-ecclesiology grammar “embellished” and “superficial,” but it is still Gothic, even if “elemental.” Just as Protestants built in Gothic before Tractarians, so they continued to build in “serious” Gothic in the new Canada long after their arrival, whether Methodist, Presbyterian, or Baptist.8 Though the Church of England was the most determined to wrap itself in Gothic, the main differences in Gothic style were not in whether the church had only early “embellishments” that were “tentative, almost accidental forays into the Gothic idiom” or a later full Gothic style.9 Many churches of various denominations espoused both the earlier “tentative” and the later

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full-blown Gothic. The cardinal distinction was whether a church was equipped with the ecclesiologically correct internal Gothic architecture of chancel and raised altar. Finley, who has considered this subject more than most, concluded that though the “Saint John Protestants were unanimous in their acceptance of the Gothic Revival,” it would be an error to think that the city had become “a Tractarian stronghold.” Rather, it is important “to distinguish between aesthetics and theology,” for even with the Saint John Anglicans, their adoption of Gothic showed that “aesthetic preferences often transcend theological doctrine.” What then is the significance of Gothic? Finley, quoting Medley, concluded that it was clearly a case of British North America and the new Canada choosing “England’s Church, England’s faith and England’s loyalty.” Thus each spire pointed not just to the glory of God but also to “a proud imperial ideal” that the parishioners cherished.10 In addition to being an expression of patriotism, perhaps Gothic represented English respectability in the new country. But what was the spiritual significance of Gothic? Not just Tractarian Anglicans, but all Protestant churches were in one way or another Restoration churches, and their Gothic grammar spoke of ancient roots to which they were appealing. A church wrapped in Gothic seemed less a newcomer and carried the gravitas of a continuation of the past. Through it they proclaimed the weight of Christianity to a society undergoing unprecedented change and increasingly taken up with the bubble of materialism. As William Westfall observed, it was through a common Gothic front that Protestants proclaimed “the power and reality of the sacred in the secular world.” Nevertheless, in that act they further isolated their faith from the society in which they bought and sold.11 But what of specifically Tractarian churches? The liturgy of the Oxford Movement required not just a Gothic house but one with a chancel and raised altar, for it was precisely this “proper arrangement” of internal Gothic architecture that they “intended as symbols of more profound shifts in liturgical theory or practice.”12 Feild seemed to think that the presentation itself of ecclesiologically correct Gothic Anglican uniformity would engender the spirituality he desired, forgetting that the beholder might respond otherwise. While “climbing over the boulders” along a stream “between some magnificent mountains” at the head of Little Harbour Deep in White Bay, he was struck with “the absence of all living creatures … and the occasional whistle or scream of some sea-bird.” He reflected at the time that one might find the experience “grateful or painful, according to the disposition and state of mind.”13 But he did not make the same allowance for how people would respond to his chancel Anglicanism. To his dismay, instead of all Anglicans making the correct spiritual response, they reacted in a variety of ways. Many

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rejected the segregation of priest and chancel outright. They walked out of the solemn stillness and reached for intimacy and ecstasy in the warm and embracing arms of Methodism. But what of those who did not? How did they interpret the new architecture? As Peter Burke has highlighted, “Who appropriates what for what purposes and with what consequences?” It is an open question to what degree those with Prayer Book in hand became Tractarian over time through the practice of liturgy in the ecclesiologically correct Gothic setting. Many appear to have negotiated their way by simply becoming more liturgical, more open to the “affective influence … of ecclesiastical objects,” while continuing to hold their Protestant views.14 There were varying degrees of compliance and resistance to Tractarianism in communities with both a clergyman and Gothic theatre, as we have seen, such as at Harbour Buffett, Brigus, Greenspond, Pinchard’s Island, Twillingate, Burgeo, and Port aux Basques. But unlike these, few outports had a priest. Like the bishop, he was a summertime visitor, at most once a month, generally less often. This meant that a lay reader was in charge of the service each week. In communities that had “correct” Gothic churches, he ministered against the backdrop of interior Tractarian architecture in which clergy increased their focus on the altar. Throughout the 1880s many of them requested donations from England that were focused upon the sacrament, for in addition to fonts, they asked for such altar items as cloths, frontals, candlesticks, chalices, and patens. They also wanted surplices and stoles for themselves.15 Anglicans in general appear to have increasingly accepted that these were the paraphernalia of clergymen in their chancels. As happened in Australia, the distress and agitation that occurred when Tractarianism was introduced to evangelical Anglicanism waned, and people gradually accepted its vestiges severed from its theology: “By the 1900s they were becoming accepted as normal Anglican usages, adopted by many churches that did not identify themselves as ‘high.’” Finley concluded the same for New Brunswick.16 But of course these paraphernalia had little to do with the lay reader who ministered to the people with “the Word” outside the chancel rail and its altar and sacrament. Few smaller outports had such churches. But even in outports that did, large and small, the people attended only for a small portion of the year, because they worked in migratory fisheries in summer and moved to winter quarters in late fall. In these transhumant worship venues, it was the print culture of Prayer Book, tracts, books, and religious periodicals of the Word that predominated. Thus along with appeals for sacramental items for the priest, the most common request for the people was for tracts, books, and religious publications such as the Guardian, Church Times, Mission Field, Sunday Friend, and Gospeller.17

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In many places along the coast, the attempt to stamp “order and uniformity” on the “wild” was wishful thinking, an unattainable goal, like resolving to commandeer a ghost ship. When Feild was faced with this impossibility he became greatly frustrated, for instance, regarding baptism, especially since he viewed it with the heightened sacramental import reimagined from a Tractarian perspective. When he finally entered White Bay on “the debatable shore” in 1857, he had to admit that he could not consistently impose “order” on the “anomalies and irregularities” that he found as he sailed from harbour to harbour. Some parents had children who were baptized by women, some by men who could read well and some who could not, some even by a French Catholic priest “and no one could say ‘with what words.’” Feild experienced acute emotional dissonance over the diversity. Even as a bishop with a portable font, he was still unable “to unravel and rectify” the diverse views and circumstances of the frontier people.18 He could not come to terms with the illusion that “order and uniformity” was. Henry Bailey, warden of the missionary college St Augustine’s, perceived the situation more clearly. He saw striving for uniformity as chasing a mirage. “The Missionary of the Church of England … finds himself in a dilemma. Shall he regard himself as bound hand and foot, in every particular injunction, to the Act of Uniformity [1662] … to which the Prayer Book is but a schedule, and so induce formalism, stagnation, and paralysis (as undoubtedly he would) upon all his Missionary work? The thing is an impossibility, and treated universally as such, even in England. Variations, deviations, peculiarities, elasticity, there must be, as there were in the primitive liturgies, and as there have been ever since,”19 and even more so in people’s spirituality. Feild did demonstrate such “elasticity” when he gave up the idea of Tractarian uniformity at Ward’s Harbour and surrendered himself in worship with the fisherman with his “five square windows” instead of attempting to pin him to Gothic forms. Did he come to realize on Long Island, as his architect William Gray had already unwittingly implied, that Gothic architecture, instead of being an ancient primitive form, was merely a changing style? “Fashions … are palmed off … here as new which really are stale enough in England. Church-building, is in the same predicament; the revival, which began … in 1839, can scarcely be said to have begun here.”20 Just beyond Ward’s Harbour in Notre Dame Bay, the Hawk hit Foolscap Rock with a “very violent” strike and was grounded, with the tide just beginning to fall. After several hours upon the rocks with damaged planks and timbers strained, the tide returned, and with much of the ballast removed, the vessel was refloated. But it “leaked greatly,” and with all hands at the pumps had to be towed into harbour. “The wounded Hawk” limped into Fogo for

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makeshift repairs to enable it to proceed to St John’s. Feild, abandoning ship for the first time, continued his visitation generally accommodated by merchants. When Feild wrote to the spg at their January 1858 meeting, he gave “a brief but striking account” of the voyage and wanted funds so badly that he contemplated selling his vessel to get them. One wonders if being high and dry on the Foolscap was a factor in considering such a move.21 Regardless, the event is a picture of Feild attempting to prescribe Tractarianism for Newfoundland and Labrador. While he made slow progress beating against the wind, the diverse vernacular spirituality of evangelical Anglicanism and Methodism was his Foolscap, and he ran aground upon it. As the people chose their horizons in the annual round of sealing, fishing, and wood production, so they negotiated their spirituality, incorporating into their Protestant ways at different times and to varying degrees elements from Bishop Feild’s imagined universe brought from Oxford. While he was welcomed as bishop in sundry harbours with guns and bunting, at the end of his voyage he would slip through the Narrows into St John’s harbour unnoticed, probably relieved that his Hawk and his Tractarian project, though in questionable shape due to surprise encounters, were still afloat. But no one could deny that in his dream to Gothicize Newfoundland and Labrador, Bishop Feild had valiantly tilted at innumerable foes.

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Notes to pages 000–000

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Notes

abbreviations adenla cfms dcb dnb enl kjv lms ncs nss qel rpa soas spck spg sprk uc Archives wmms

Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador Archive Canada Foreign Mission Society Dictionary of Canadian Biography Dictionary of National Biography Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador King James Version London Missionary Society Newfoundland Church Society Newfoundland School Society Queen Elizabeth II Library Rooms Provincial Archives School of Oriental and African Studies Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor Archives of the United Church of Canada, Newfoundland Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society

introduction 1 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (hereafter spg), a196, J.M. Martine, Brigus, 3 April 1846. 2 Leamon, Brigus, 321. For his sealing record, see Chafe, Chafe’s Sealing Book, 48–56. 3 Church, Oxford Movement Twelve Years 1833–1845; Chadwick, Mind of the Oxford Movement; Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context; Turner, John Henry Newman; Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement.

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Notes to pages 4–9

4 Protestant is used here to refer to the evangelicalism of the Reformation. It is correct that the Church of England officially called itself Protestant, as did Bishop Feild. However, Protestants, Church of England or otherwise, saw Tractarian Anglicans as Catholic, even approximating Roman Catholicism. 5 Turner, John Henry Newman, 55–6. Arguing another variation on Jürgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” Turner pointed out that “in chapels, barns, cottages, fields, and a host of religious societies, evangelicals provided a multitude of locations where both the poor and the middle classes encountered the preaching of irregular clergy and learned to discuss theological, biblical, ecclesiastical, moral, and social questions outside the spaces and authority of the established churches and traditional Dissenting denominations” (53). 6 Quoted in Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 69; spg, a216, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 21 October 1854. Bishop Michael Anthony Fleming’s ultramontanism was another romantic reaction to rationalism and a hierarchical reaction to liberalism, and “looked to Rome for moral teaching, regulation of liturgical practice, clerical moral and intellectual formation and discipline, for inspiration in ecclesiastical architectural and artistic styles” (FitzGerald, “Conflict and Culture in Irish-Newfoundland Roman Catholicism,” 90–4). See also Murphy, Concise History of Christianity in Canada, 169–70; and Grant, Profusion of Spires, 118–23. 7 For a call to investigate popular agency, see Cadigan, “Power and Agency in Newfoundland and Labrador’s History,” and his Newfoundland and Labrador, which includes people as makers of history. 8 Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society,” 164. 9 Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” 240–1; Burke, “Overture,” 11. 10 Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 1 (July 1847): 1–2; 13 (July 1848): 1. See also, for instance, “Progress of the Colonial Episcopate,” 92 (February 1855): 281–90; “The Bishop of London,” 110 (August 1856): 41–3. 11 Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 309 (March 1873): 106. 12 FitzGerald, “Conflict and Culture in Irish-Newfoundland Roman Catholicism,” 26, 459. 13 Lambert, “Far from the Homes of Their Fathers,” 87–8, 121, 134–6. 14 Keough, Slender Thread, 164–7, 170–2. 15 Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 283–5; Gordon Winter in foreword to House, Edward Feild, xiii; Senior, “Edward Feild,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography (hereafter dcb), 10:281; William Pilot, “The Church of

Notes to pages 10–12

16

17 18

19

20

21

22

23

305

England in Newfoundland,” in “A History of the Churches in Newfoundland,” a “Supplement” to Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 11; Alfred Morine (1857–1944) in his unpublished “History of Newfoundland” also concluded, “The great man of the Church of England in Newfoundland was Bishop Feild” (Rooms Provincial Archives [hereafter rpa], mg 271.1, Alfred Morine, “History of Newfoundland,” folder 15, “The Churches,” 18). “Almost every colonial bishop was treated a biography in heroic mode” to inspire “potential contributors to missionary projects, and potential future missionaries” (Carey, God’s Empire, 375, 377). Jones, “Bishop Feild,” v, 269, 271, 334, 340–41; Jones, Edward Feild Bishop of Newfoundland, 27–8, 30–1. Jones elsewhere estimated that he was “a remarkable man who could have graced the episcopal bench in England” (“John Bull’s Other Ireland,” 230). Feild, Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland, June 25, 1866, 24. Hiller, “The 1855 Election in Bonavista Bay,” 69. The Newfoundland School Society (hereafter nss) was later renamed the Colonial Church and School Society. It had the backing of evangelical lords, bishops, and vicars back home (Carey, God’s Empire, 156). See Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion”; Jones, “Bishops in Politics”; Jones, “Religion, Education and Politics in Newfoundland”; Greene, “Influence of Religion in the Politics of Newfoundland, 1850–1861”; Greene, Between Damnation and Starvation; McCann, “Politics of Denominational Education.” Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 1–20; Senior, “Edward Feild,” dcb 10:278; Jones, Edward Feild Bishop of Newfoundland, 7–8. Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 29, 339; Jones, Edward Feild Bishop of Newfoundland, 13–14; Jones, “Making of a Colonial Bishop,” 3; Anglican Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador Archives (hereafter adenla), Bishop Feild, Oderin, Placentia Bay, to George Gilbert Scott, 18 September, 1845; Coffman, “St John’s Anglican Cathedral,” 6; Sanderson, “How High Was He?,” ii. See also 16, 37, 115–16, 148–9. Mission Field 9 (September 1864): 162; Tucker, Under His Banner, 325; Millman and Kelley, Atlantic Canada to 1900, 51; Rollmann, “Colonial Episcopate of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland Missions,” 27. D. Murray Young, “George Coster,” dcb, 8:171; Frederick Jones, “Edward Wix,” dcb, 9:847. Clergy in colonies without a bishop were under the nominal authority of the bishop of London, “an anomalous and very inadequate substitute for the practical authority of a diocesan bishop” (Bishop Blomfield, London, to archbishop of Canterbury, 24 April 1840, “A Letter from the Bish-

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26 27

28 29

30

31

Notes to pages 12–15

op of London to His Grace the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, upon the Formation of a Fund for Endowing Additional Bishoprics in the Colonies,” British Magazine 17 [June 1840]: 682–3). Mission Life 3 (1872): 218, “In Memoriam. Bishop Spencer.” uc Archives, wy 100, box 1, 1829–73, 1839–43, Newfoundland Auxiliary Wesleyan Missionary Society, Meeting of 15 November 1839; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1843, 766; spg 1843 Report, xxxiv. Headon, “Influence of the Oxford Movement,” 104. Hayes, Anglicans in Canada, 65. See, for instance, the Tractarian network of Bishop John Medley when he was appointed bishop of Fredericton. John Keble helped support the Colonial Bishoprics Fund from his Christian Year and other publications, and personally designated an anonymous donation to Medley (Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness, 37–9). It was billed at the time as “a work … by far the most important which the Church of England had undertaken since the era of the Reformation” (E.C. Woollcombe, “The New Declaration of the Council of the Colonial Bishoprics Fund,” Mission Field 18 [February 1873]: 33–4). Its fund enabled High Church episcopacy to “escape from its dependency on the missionary societies for personnel and policy” (Carey, God’s Empire, 271). Headon, “Influence of the Oxford Movement,” 279. Edinburgh Review 242 (October 1863): 556–8, 565–8; “The Colonial Episcopate,” Ernest Hawkins, Pall Mall, 3 October 1863, Colonial Church Chronicle, 197 (November 1863): 433; Carey, God’s Empire, 91. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 285 (italics in original); Bishop Blomfield, London, to archbishop of Canterbury, 24 April 1840, British Magazine 17 (June 1840): 682. Price, “Missionary Work in Newfoundland,” 181; Mission Field 21 (July 1876): 214; Medley, Charge Delivered by the Right Revd John, Lord Bishop of Fredericton, 11–12; Medley, Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Fredericton, 4; Medley, Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Fredericton, 8, 13– 14; Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 290; Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness, 46–7, 59–60, 127–9; Feild’s “sympathetic” biographer, Frederick Jones, yet said that “Bishop Feild was not a man to compromise … antagonizing Roman Catholics, dividing Anglicans, alienating Methodists, arousing anti-Tractarian sentiment, splitting Protestant unity” (Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” v; Jones, Edward Feild Bishop of Newfoundland, 11). Malcom Ross is observant in noting that it was Medley’s tendency to follow peace “by a spirit of coexistence rather than by compromise” (“John Medley,” dcb, 12:714). This is not to suggest that he did not have a pointed Tractarian program for the Church of Eng-

Notes to pages 15–16

32

33 34 35 36

37 38

39

40 41

307

land in New Brunswick, or that he did not face significant popular opposition in carrying it out, for example at Trinity Church, Saint John (Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness, 57–63, 104–12, 125–6; Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 130–45). spg, a189, James Balfour, Harbour Grace, to William Morice, secretary, 13 November 1790. Quoted in “Contributions to the Church History of Newfoundland. IV,” Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 74 (August 1853): 47; “Diocese of Newfoundland, Part 1,” Monthly Record (February 1855): 35; Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G., 92. John Harris visited Harbour Grace three years after Balfour and judged, “The inhabitants of this Bay are more religiously inclined than any people I have ever met with in this country” (John Harris, St John’s, to spg, 4 January 1793, “Contributions to the Church History of Newfoundland, IV,” Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal [London] 74 [August 1853]: 48). Canon Walter Smith later commented, “I am convinced that the fault which he [Balfour] ascribes to the many was, in most instances, that of the few. He does not appear ever to have won the affection of the people to whom he ministered (“Notes on Church History,” Diocesan Magazine 30 [January 1918]: 14). Tucker, Under His Banner, 342; Price, “Missionary Work in Newfoundland,” 156; Balleine, History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England, 173. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 78; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 78. Ibid.; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 56; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 26. [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1859,” 7 July 1859; [Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation, 10; spg, a222, Benjamin Smith, Trinity, 31 December 1854. Goudie, “Supreme Court on Circuit,” 126–7, 138; Mullock, Two Lectures on Newfoundland, 55. Queen Elizabeth II Library (hereafter qel), “Diary of Rev. Henry Lind of Sandy Point,” 15 August 1857. This is likely the attack mentioned by Bishop Feild in 1848 ([Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 29). spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 15 February, 25 September, November 1845; [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy … of Newfoundland … 1858, 12–14. spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, November 1845. Bishop Feild, Bermuda, 7 February 1866, quoted in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 211; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfound-

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43 44

45

46 47

48

49

Notes to pages 16–18

land’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 44, 101, 106–7, 117; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 36–7, 81; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 45. Ferryland – spg, a193, Charles J. Shreve, St John’s, 29 September 1834; a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 30 January, 3 May 1861; Bishop Feild, Halifax, to Ernest Hawkins, 12 December 1861. Placentia – spg, a194, Bishop Spencer’s Visit to Placentia Bay in 1843, 3 July 1843; William Jeynes, Harbour Buffett, to Bishop Spencer, 28 December 1841; a195, Bishop Feild, Great Placentia, to Ernest Hawkins, 25 November 1845; a222, W.K. White, Harbour Buffett, Quarterly Report, Harbour Buffett, 30 September 1854. Peter Winser – Patriot (St John’s), 31 May 1847, Peter Winser, letter to editor; Patriot (St John’s), 25 May, 1 June 1850, Peter Winser, “Letters in Reply to the Rev. T.F.H. Bridge”; Bridge, Letter to Peter Winser. Keough, Slender Thread, 70–4; Howley, Ecclesiastical History of Newfoundland, 323; spg, Sermon … 1825, 50. See The Codner Centenary, or the Performance of a Vow: A Short Review of the Rise and Progress of the Colonial and Continental Church Society 1823–1923 (s.l.: s.n., 1924?). Rowe, History of Education in Newfoundland, 39; Millman and Kelley, Atlantic Canada to 1900, 87. W. Gordon Handcock concluded that the legacy of Codner was a “positive change in Newfoundland’s social, cultural, and educational life” (dcb, “Samuel Codner,” 8:164–7). nss, Proceedings … 1848–1849, 1; nss, Proceedings … 1840–1841, 1. There had been High Church influences, for example, with William Bullock at Trinity, who yet claimed “Evangelical Truth, Apostolic Order.” It is not coincidental that the renowned hymn he composed in 1827 for the consecration of the local church, “We Love the Place, O Lord, Wherein Thine Honour Dwells,” mentions loving “the sacred Font” and the “altar steps are dear,” but there is no word about loving its pulpit (Bullock, Songs of the Church, 37–8; Bullock, Memoir of the Very Rev. William Bullock, 9). He held “views totally in accord with the beliefs” of Tractarian Bishop Hibbert Binney, by whom he was appointed dean of St Luke’s, Halifax (C.E. Thomas, “William Bullock,” dcb, 10:110). Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 443. “Low Church” here refers to evangelical Anglicans as the term was applied to them by Tractarians, beginning in the 1840s, and which they welcomed. It has no connotation of its earlier Latitudinarian reference (Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 32; Balleine, History of the Evangelical Party, 209). Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 495. Patrick O’Flaherty highlighted this lack of popular focus in Prowse (Rock Observed, 80). On interpreting Prowse, see Jerry Bannister, “Whigs and Nationalists.” For an incisive call to investigate

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popular agency in history, see Cadigan, “Power and Agency in Newfoundland and Labrador’s History.” 50 Frederick Jones, “Edward Feild,” dcb, 10:279; Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 188; Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” iv, 285, 337–8; McCrea, Lost Amid the Fogs, 170–1; Pilot, “Church of England in Newfoundland,” in “A History of the Churches in Newfoundland,” a “Supplement” to Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 10, 12; nss, Annual Report … 1877, 80. 51 Gregg Finley argued that Medley’s similar Gothic Revival project in New Brunswick, partially imitated by Protestant sects, produced an “aesthetic” more than a “theology,” which had a diffusive effect in the culture of bolstering Englishness and loyalty to empire (Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival”). For the terms Gothic box and Protestant preaching box, see Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 10, 17. 52 The Church of England missionary George Coster on the northeast coast was the first to articulate the reason for the constant increase of small settlements with a growing fishing population: “Every little cove along the coast is now more or less inhabited, and those which today are perhaps occupied by only a single family may in a few years be thickly populated. But the population cannot increase in any such place much beyond a certain point. When there are as many fishing rooms erected as there is space for, a partial migration must soon take place to some other spot not fully occupied. Thus almost innumerable little settlements are forming too poor to contribute more than the merest trifle towards their own religious instruction or their children’s education” (spg a192, George Coster, Bonavista, 21 July 1827). So also Ulrich Rule on the west coast reflected later on “this peculiarity in Newfoundland … The nature of the soil and climate is such that the greater part of the population must always depend for subsistence upon the fisheries, and this necessitates their dispersal in very small settlements along every part of the coast. The larger a settlement becomes the greater becomes the difficulties with which its inhabitants have to cope in the prosecution of their craft. The fish are destroyed and driven to a distance; long, toilsome and dangerous journeys have to be taken in their pursuit; and increase of population results in diminution of prosperity. Hence the tendency is everywhere to dispersal rather than to concentration; and the spiritual pastor, unable to gather his flock about him in one, or even two or three congregations, must go to them in a multiplicity of tiny settlements” (Ulrich Rule, “Recollections of a Newfoundland Missionary,” Church Work, Mission Life 1 [July 1885]: 41). George J. Mountain on the south coast observed that “every two or three miles there are a few families, four, six, ten or sometimes two, for the sake of getting as much of the fishing as possible to themselves.” As a result “the mere passing visits of a Cler-

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54

55 56

57 58

Notes to pages 19–21

gyman” could accomplish “very little” (Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 11 (May 1848): 425, 428). And Bishop Feild also observed, “Families have from time to time migrated to and settled in these remote districts, scattering themselves widely, with the view of obtaining the means of subsistence in larger abundance and with greater ease” ([Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 5). See also Head, Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland, 181–7, 246–8.” Of course, the Labrador fishery and the vessel phase of the seal fishery enabled a concentration of people in larger communities in Newfoundland (Sanger, “Evolution of Sealing and the Spread of Settlement in Northeastern Newfoundland,” 146–50). The anthropologist Philip Smith drew attention to the fact of winter transhumance in Newfoundland history. “Winterhousing is the hidden side of the moon in the Newfoundland past, the sealed room in the collective memory. Yet how can we effectively understand Newfoundland culture and history if we ignore what many outport people were doing for up to half of each year?” “In Winter Quarters,” 2. See also Smith, “Transhumant Europeans Overseas: The Newfoundland Case,” 241–50; Smith, “Transhumance among European Settlers in Atlantic Canada,” 79–86; Smith, “Winter-Houses and Winter Migrations,” 594–599; and Pope, Fish into Wine, 248–54. For the significance of winter transhumance in the growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, see also Hollett, Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy. This is not unusual for a man of Oxford. Fellow Tractarian Richard Hurrell Froude, with whom Feild unsuccessfully competed for a fellowship at Oriel, was also nautically inclined. His contemporary, Richard W. Church, said of Froude, “He loved the sea; he liked to sail his own boat, and enjoyed rough weather, and took interest in the niceties of seamanship and shipcraft” (Church, Oxford Movement Twelve Years, 35–6; Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 15). [Feild], Order and Uniformity, 13–14; Feild, Diary … 1844, 49, 68. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 36, 240; spg, Quarterly Paper 32 (January 1845): 2–3, “Arrival of the Church Ship,” Bishop Feild, 15 September 1844. spg, Quarterly Paper 31, quoted in British Magazine 27 (June 1845): 615; Welch, “Newfoundland Church-Ship Hawk,” 117–18. British Magazine 27 (June 1845): 615–6; Christian Remembrancer 20 (October 1850): 492; Feild, Diary … 1844, Edward Feild to William Scott, August, 81. Allen Welch noted the “less aggressive names,” Dove, Amity, and Harmony that the Baptists and Moravians had called their gospel vessels (Welch, “New-

Notes to pages 22–4

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60

61

62

63 64 65

66

67

68

311

foundland Church-Ship Hawk,” 135). Feild had also hoped to acquire a steamer instead of a sailing vessel, and that was not to be either. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 124, Bishop Feild, Church Ship, Burin, 26 September 1855. Also printed in Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 101 (November 1855): 195; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 119–20; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 123–5; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 94, 109. [Feild], Order and Uniformity, 18; Brown and Nockles, Oxford Movement and the Wider World, 2; Bishop Feild, 18 July 1844, quoted in Welch, “Newfoundland Church-Ship Hawk,” 120. Feild refers to his vessel as the “Church-ship” ten times in his Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Missions of the Northern Coast, 1846, for example. “Journal of Rev. Martin Blackmore,” 25 July 1845; Bridge also in speaking to his fellow clergymen referred to Feild’s “yacht,” instead of to the “church ship” (Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 1). [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 13; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 69–70; [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of Bermuda … 1853, 4; Reid, Trinity Church Bermuda, 49; Welch, “Newfoundland Church-Ship Hawk,” 128–9. Storer, “Journals, Labrador, 1849,” 13, 15 August 1849. Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 243 (September 1867): 398. spg, Report … 1852, lxxxviii; Gospel Missionary, 8 (August 1871): 119–20; letter of W.E. Gladstone, Hawarden, 18 September 1876, printed in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, viii; See also, Mission Field 22 (April 1877): 125; Church Review 60 (January 1891): 171. [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of Bermuda, 1853, 15; Bishop Feild, Merlin, to E. Coleridge, Hawarden, 18 September 1876, printed in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 100–1; Reid, Trinity Church Bermuda, 49. He was in Bermuda during the winters of 1845, 1846, 1849, 1850, 1851, 1855, 1857, 1858, 1860, 1861, 1862, March of 1864, 1865, 1866, 1868, 1870, 1872, 1874, 1876; in England 1853, 1859, 1867 (Reid, Trinity Church Bermuda, 43–58, and spg letters). This is in great contrast to Bishop Medley, who spent nearly fifty “severe” winters in New Brunswick, during most of which he “traveled to the far corners of his diocese to baptize and confirm” (Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness, 63–4). spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 19 June 1845; [spg], Work in the Colonies, 68; Reid, Trinity Church Bermuda, 47–8. The population

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69 70 71 72

73 74

75

76 77 78

79 80

Notes to pages 25–6

of Bermuda in 1851 was 10,982; of Newfoundland in 1857 was 122,638 (Coke, Census of the British Empire, 212–13). For a detailed account of this work, see William Grey, “Ecclesiology of Newfoundland,” 156–7. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast, 20. [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 28. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 63; spg, a217, “Extract from Bishop Feild’s Journal, 1859, White Bay,” 12, 18, 22 July, 1859. Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 91 (January 1855): 248, “The Church in Newfoundland.” [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 7. The Christian Remembrancer spoke of “his larder, which consists of an open cask of biscuit,” Christian Remembrancer 20 (July–December 1850): 497. Brown and Nockles, Oxford Movement and the Wider World, 2, 17; Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 96, 119; Froude, Remains, e.g. 1:10–11, 25–6, 40–2; [Feild], “Lordship’s Late Visitation, 1867,” 3 September 1867. Of course, this is not to imply that he was not committed to a life of surrender and service as he understood it. If, as Frederick Jones estimated, he could have been a bishop even in England, lacking only social status and political connections, he could have lived the life of Dr Proudie in Barchester Towers. Barring that, he certainly could have chosen to live the “pleasant and uneventful life” of an English country parson (Jones, “Making of a Colonial Bishop,” 9–10; Trollope, Barchester Towers, 24–8, 41, 151). Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle 38 (June 1869): 307. Evans, For Love of a Woman, 12. Botwood is a later name for Ship Cove. spg, Account … 1827, 62–102; spg, Sermon … 1829, 115–18; spg, Sermon … 1830, 32–3, 80–91; spg, Sermon … 1831, 104–10; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 37–42. The union was further paraded throughout the empire with the publication of “The Bishop of Newfoundland and Lord Dundonald,” Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 103 (January 1856): 255–7. There was even consideration given to leasing the Hawk to circuit court judges, which surely would have caused some confusion on later episcopal “visitations” as to who exactly was entering the harbour (Feild, Diary … 1844, 80). Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 42 (December 1850): 236. Feild, Charge Delivered to the Clergy of Bermuda … 1866, 11–12. Feild may have seen a connection between Puritanism in England and other sectarianism in the United States and it, referring both to “the late calamitous war” of 1861

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and to the Declaration of Independence and its “preposterous doctrine … that ‘all men are created equal,’” 11, 21. 81 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 126. 82 Welch, “Newfoundland Church-Ship Hawk,” 117; W.A. Elder, “Work in Newfoundland,” Mission Life 3 (1872): 637. 83 Pereiro noted that Samuel Francis Wood, author of the first history of Tractarianism, judged that Froude “personified the spirit and energy” of the movement (Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 42).

chapter one 1 Faught, Oxford Movement, 5; Chandler, Introduction to the Oxford Movement, 6–7. 2 For instance, it was evangelicals inside and Dissenters outside that John Henry Newman saw as the greatest threat to the Church of England, as Newman clearly articulated in his 1850 Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching. By then he was appealing to Tractarians to give up on their project and convert to Roman Catholicism, as he had done, for Tractarianism was a lost cause as a result of the power of Parliament. He “identified evangelical Protestantism, as the power injecting the actual theological poison into the erastian political structure … Protestantism, most especially in its evangelical guise, so infused the political framework of the English Church as to render the latter incapable of realizing Catholic principles” (Turner, John Henry Newman, 22). 3 Yates, Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism, 12. 4 Chandler, Introduction to the Oxford Movement, 97–9; Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 93–4; Bishop Feild, 19 June 1850, quoted in Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 131. 5 Yates, Buildings, Faith and Worship, 132. For the contemporary debate regarding the efficacy of the sacraments, opus operans and opus operatum, see, for instance, M’Ilvaine, Oxford Divinity, 218–25. For a clarification of the terms, see Cross and Livingstone, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 591–2; and McGrath, Christian Theology, 405–8. 6 [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1866, 19. For instance, rebaptism at Lamaline (Public Ledger [St John’s], 16 May 1851). However, the people had a different perspective on baptism altogether. Their main concern was to hear the prayers read as outlined in the Prayer Book. Thus when Bishop Feild asked Joseph Osmond of Seal Cove, “‘By whom was this child baptized?’ he answered, ‘By one Joseph Bird, and a

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Notes to pages 29–34

fine reader he was.’ This Bird, who on account of his fine readings, had been employed to baptise many children in the bay, was a servant in a fisherman’s family” ([Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 28). One would have thought he was Joseph Bird, the merchant or his son, of Sturminster Newton (Berger, Good and Beautiful Bay, 39–42). Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 250–1; Chandler, Introduction to the Oxford Movement, 118–19; Yates, Oxford Movement and Anglican Ritualism, 20; Patriot (St John’s), 13 February 1847. Chadwick, Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 19. Colonial Church Chronicle (London), 74 (August 1853): 41; “The Atlantic Telegraph,” Colonial Church Chronicle (London) 136 (October 1858): 387–8; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, 4 September 1858. For Tractarianism and romanticism, see Chadwick, Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 18–19, 46, 53; Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 197–8, 325; Gilley, “John Keble and the Victorian Churching of Romanticism”; Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 86–7, 95. Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 1, 5, 8–9, 13; “Important Charge of the Bishop of Worcester Delivered to the Candidates for Ordination at Their Final Examination, December 21, 1844,” Public Ledger (St John’s), 11 February 1845. Cannadine, In Churchill’s Shadow, 6–7. The committee chose Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin’s Gothic design. For “invented traditions” of ritual and ceremony of the British monarchy itself, see Cannadine, “Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual.” Stone, “John Henry Newman,” 230–1, 241–3. Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 195–6; Church, Oxford Movement Twelve Years, 11; Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 43–4, 48–52, 59. Short, Newman and His Contemporaries, 20, 432n89. [Keble], Christian Year, 1:49, 143–4. Gilley, “John Keble and the Victorian Churching of Romanticism,” 232; Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 78–9, 96–7. Ure, Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines, 2:590–91; Tocque, Wandering Thoughts, 213; Ryan, Ice Hunters, 70–86. The first appeared in 1840 (Tocque, Wandering Thoughts, 340). Jukes, General Report of the Geological Survey of Newfoundland, 151–2. Feild, Diary … 1844, 30, 42, 44. He exclaimed in a letter, “an iron-bound coast, apparently doomed to eternal sterility” (Bishop Feild, St John’s, to a friend in Oxford, 15 July 1844, Church of England Magazine 17 [July–December 1844]: 31). A writer in the Ecclesiologist claimed that Newfoundland was “an island the most inhospitable upon which the Caucasian race

Notes to pages 35–40

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26 27

28

29

30

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has permanently settled, and which is so entirely a rock that it is difficult to collect sufficient earth with which to bury the dead” (Ecclesiologist 65 [April 1848]: 275). For the construct of the colonizer mindset, see Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire. McGowan, “Coming out of the Cloister,” 182, 185. [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 3, 9, 14–15, 20–1. Ibid., 44. Times (St John’s), 6 December 1848. As Victor Hugo succinctly stated, Tractarians were “turned more towards the Old Testament than the New” (Toilers of the Sea, 1:245). Benjamin Smith, “Mission of Trinity, Newfoundland,” Mission Field 8 (September 1863): 209. [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 22; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 31 (January 1850): 244–5. Feild wanted clergy who were “modest and submissive” (spg, a249, Bishop Feild, Labrador, to Ernest Hawkins, 4 July 1861). [Feild], Order and Uniformity, 14. It did not always work out. A Canadian missionary visited a “perpendicular Gothic” church in New York and found that the stained-glass windows with “the dark-coloured walls and roof, gave a sombre, but rather perhaps gloomy effect” (“Extract of a Letter from a Canadian Missionary,” 4 October 1847, Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal [London] 10 [April 1848]: 379). Feild, Diary … 1844, 57; Feild, “Charge, Delivered to the Clergy of Bermuda, 1845”; Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 171. John Medley, Feild’s counterpart in New Brunswick, said likewise, “Throughout the whole of North America no correct type of a church was formerly to be seen” (Ecclesiologist 66 [June 1848]: 361). Chadwick, Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 1–2; Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 325; Nockles, “Oxford Movement and the Legacy of Anglican Evangelicalism,” 58; Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 79–80, 87–95. Livingston, Modern Christian Thought, 117. spg, a222, Jacob G. Mountain, Harbour Breton, Quarterly Report, “Log of the Mission Yacht,” 23 August 1854; a249, Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 9 November 1847 (emphasis in original); Mountain, “Memoir of the Reverend Jacob George Mountain,” 227; Grey, Sketches of Newfoundland and Labrador, plates 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17. Matthew 8:20. Feild, Order and Uniformity, 11; [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 5–6, 7; Feild, Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1858, 15, 20; Feild, “Charge Delivered to

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Notes to pages 40–4

the Clergy of Bermuda … 1845.” See also, [Medley], Charge Delivered in the Cathedral, 12, 13, 14, 24, 27, 36, 39, 49, 51; [Medley], Charge to the Clergy … 1853, 8, 18, 19,27, 32, 33. Lloyd “traced the descent of the Prayer Book from the Roman Breviary” (Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland,” 14). His students included Newman, Froude, Pusey, and John Medley (Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness, 27–8). Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 212, 234; Brock and Curthoys, History of the University of Oxford, 6:201. John Masefield, “Cargoes,” Golden Caravan. See also J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting “Temeraire,” Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838, in Smiles, Turner Book, 144. For example, Robert Dyer at Greenspond distributed 700–800 tracts and books to the departing sealers in 1856. He noted, “The men, as usual, are very anxious to get the tracts and books to take with them … Many of those who are fond of reading, come and beg ten or twelve for themselves, saying ‘We like, sir, to have a few of our own’” (White, “Robert Dyer Diary, 1841– 1859,” 27 February 1856). Similarly, in 1859 Charles Carpenter at Salmon Bay and Bonne Esperance distributed “20,000 pages of tracts, 1,000 papers and magazines, and over 200 volumes” to fishermen on the Labrador (Charles C. Carpenter, Bernardston, Mass., to the cfms, December 1859, Canadian Foreign Mission Society [hereafter cfms], Second Annual Report, 1859, 10). [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 12. [Feild], Order and Uniformity, 14. For example, “a silver Communion service, a font of stone, a rich cloth or covering for the holy table” and “a very rich chalice and paten of silver, and a font of stone” at the consecration of the churches at Petty Harbour and Pouch Cove (Times [St John’s], 6 December 1848), reprinted in Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 20 (February 1849): 314. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 35. Welch, “Newfoundland Church-Ship Hawk,” 123–4; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 29. Feild, Diary … 1844, 32. [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1863,” 16 July 1863; [Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 31–2; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 32; also at Lamaline, 7–8. Feild, Order and Uniformity, 10; [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 25; Medley, Charge Delivered at His Primary Visitation, 14; Medley, Charge Delivered in the Cathedral of Christ-Church, Fred-

Notes to pages 44–5

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ericton, 40; Medley, Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese by John, Bishop of Fredericton … 1853, 7. Cronyn, Charge Delivered to the Clergy, 15, 19–20. Alan Hayes called the struggle between the evangelical Cronyn and the high church John Strachan, bishop of Toronto, over Trinity College, Toronto, “perhaps the best-known battle in the Canadian wars” between the two branches of Anglicanism (Hayes, Anglicans in Canada, 130–1). [Binney], Charge Delivered to the Clergy, 1854, 17–19. Yet to evangelical Anglicans, Bishop Binney did not come near to making the grade. For the battle between George W. Hill of St Paul’s, Halifax, and Binney, see Hill, Letter to the Parishioners of St Paul’s, Halifax; and [Binney], Pastoral Letter. [Binney], “Visitation of the Bishop of Nova Scotia,” Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 138 (December 1858): 446–7; 146 (August 1859): 317. Senior, “Edward Feild,” dcb, 10:281; spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, 24 May 1870; “Voyage of the Coadjutor Bishop of Newfoundland,” Mission Field 16 (February 1871): 34–41; (March 1871): 72–85. By 1846 colonial bishops had established local colleges “for the education of native Clergy … in the Dioceses of Nova Scotia, Quebec, Toronto, Newfoundland, Fredericton, Barbados, Calcutta, and New Zealand” (Circular of the Secretary to the spg, printed in the Ecclesiastic 1 [January to June 1846]: 60). For a list of colleges throughout the empire, and numbers of graduates, 1754–1900, see Carey, God’s Empire, 267–9. spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 19 July 1844; Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland,” 89; Mission Field 6 (September 1861): 211; Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 7, 108, 123–4. It is the judgment of Peter Nockles that Pereiro has “conclusively shown” in his “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement that “ethos lay at the heart of Tractarianism, its theological principles being shaped and coloured by this conception. Pereiro focused on one of Newman’s star Oriel pupils, Samuel Francis Wood … For Wood, as for his mentor Newman, ethos was not a mere matter of taste or feeling but embodied moral characteristics which included self-resignation, self-denial, obedience, reverence, reserve, awe, submissiveness to authority and an openness to the Divine Will” (Nockles, “Oxford Movement in an Oxford College,” 17). However, all these habits were steeped in romantic “feeling.” spg, a195, Charles Blackman to spg, 8 November 1845; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 19 June 1845, 26 March 1847; Charles Blackman, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 27 March 1847; a196, Charles Blackman to Ernest Hawkins, 7 April 1848; Charles Blackman to Ernest Hawkins, 20 [August] 1848.

318

Notes to pages 45–9

51 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 14 October 1847; Nockles, “Oxford Movement in an Oxford College,” 18, 31, 32. 52 spg, a196, Charles Blackman, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 27 March 1847; Charles Blackman, Greenock, to Ernest Hawkins, 15 April [1848]. 53 [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 7; ncs, Report … 1847, 10. 54 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 21 April, 16 June, 25 September 1847; a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s to Ernest Hawkins, secretary, 11 November 1847; a198, J.P. Fletcher, London, to spg, 21 April 1845. 55 Record, 30 November 1846, 28 January, 4 February, 19 August, 18 November 1850; Price, “Missionary Work in Newfoundland,” 158, 181; Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 292. 56 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 18 April 1846; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 13 January 1848; Hayes, Anglicans in Canada, 130–1; Carey, God’s Empire, 150n7; [Vidal], Parish Sermons; Le Couteur, “Upholding Protestantism,” 312–13. 57 adenla, box 2, file 4, Bishop Feild, Oderin, to William Scott, 18 September 1845; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 107–8, 119–20; Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness, 64–5. 58 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 28, 71. 59 spg, Quarterly Paper (July 1853), printed in Spirit of Missions 18 (1853): 309; Bishop Feild, Bay de Verde, “The Late Rev. Oliver Rouse,” 11 September 1869, Mission Field 14 (November 1868): 343. 60 adenla, box 2, file 4, Bishop Feild to William Scott, 20 May 1845. 61 [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 22; [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1858, 12–14; spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to [secretary spg], 18 November 1874. 62 Feild, 1844 Diary, 3. 63 Quoted in Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 83; Feild, Diary … 1844, 43, 51, 55, 56. 64 Bishop Feild, Bermuda, letter to a friend, 2 April 1853, quoted in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 110–11. A slightly edited account was actually published at the time (spg, Quarterly Paper [July 1853], printed in Spirit of Missions 18 [1853]: 310). 65 Ketchum, Life and Work of the Most Reverend John Medley, 200; Blair, “Transatlantic Tractarians,” 286. “In New Brunswick, Medley’s unrelenting Neo-Gothic programme … came to personify England’s faith, England’s culture and England’s empire” (Finley, “The Gothic Revival and the Victorian Church in New Brunswick,” 3).

Notes to pages 51–4

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chapter two 1 Feild, Diary … 1844, 4, 5 July, 31–2; appendix A, 78, Feild to William Scott re church architecture, 11 July 1844. The Tractarian Bishop John Medley reacted similarly twenty-five years later: “The Romanist cathedral proudly dominates over the town, a huge unwieldy mass, with no attempt at beauty or ecclesiastical propriety, but possessing a kind of imposing and barbaric grandeur” ([Medley], “The Bishop of Fredericton on His Own Diocese and That of Newfoundland,” Mission Field 16 [November 1871]: 322). Medley called it “barbaric” because of its round arches and horizontal lines of Greco-Roman architecture (Medley, Elementary Remarks on Church Architecture, 11–14, 22–4). In fact, the Romanesque Revival architecture of Bishop Fleming’s cathedral was a bold ultramontane statement in stone of the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy to which Anglican episcopacy was having a difficult time relating. See also FitzGerald, “Conflict and Culture in Irish-Newfoundland Roman Catholicism,” 308–13. 2 History of St Thomas’ Church, 13; Ecclesiologist 65 (April 1848): 275. 3 Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 35; History of St Thomas’ Church, 12; Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 17. 4 Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 34–5. The aisle and chancel were not added until 1874, almost at the end of Feild’s tenure, at which time the galleries were also removed (History of St Thomas’ Church, 22–3). 5 [Feild], Order and Uniformity, 8, 12. Feild said in August that if he had the money, he then and there would have torn down the galleries and built a chancel (adenla, box 2, file 4, Feild to William Scott, 7 August 1844). 6 History of St Thomas’ Church, 19–20. 7 Feild, Diary … 1844, 32, 69, 72. 8 Collett, Church of England in Newfoundland, No. 2, 11–12. 9 [Feild], Order and Uniformity; Record, 28 January 1850 (italics in original). 10 [Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 19. 11 Patriot (St John’s), 8 March, 28 June, 11, 19 July 1843. 12 Public Ledger (St John’s), 1 August 1843; 29 August 1843, reprint of article in Liverpool Courier, 2 August 1843; 5 September, 10 November 1843. 13 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1842, 1073. 14 Collett, Church of England in Newfoundland, No. 2, 11–12; adenla, box 2, file 4, Feild to Scott, 20 May 1845. Bishop Medley caused similar disturbance in New Brunswick, where “there was a bitter and strong feeling against what were termed innovations,” for when he arrived, “there was not one Church in the Diocese … properly arranged” (Ketchum, Life and Work of the Most Reverend John Medley, 64).

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Notes to pages 55–9

15 Hopkins, Novelties Which Disturb Our Peace, John H. Hopkins, Burlington, Vermont, letter 1, 19 October 1843, 6–7, 52–8; letter 2, 10 January 1844, 1–3; letter 3, 16 January 1844, 3–5. 16 Collett, Church of England in Newfoundland, “Addenda,” 25. 17 Public Ledger (St John’s), 11, 18 February 1845. 18 Public Ledger (St John’s), 25 February, 4 March 1845; Arthur Burns, “Henry Phillpotts,” Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter dnb), http://www.oxforddnb/view/article/22180; Balleine, History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England, 219–22. 19 Collett, Church of England in Newfoundland, No. 2, 12. See also the excerpt of An Address Read to the Congregation of St John’s, Newfoundland, by the Bishop, 19th May, 1845, published in the Record, 28 January 1850. 20 [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 7–9, 11–15, 17–18, 44; Public Ledger (St John’s), 15 July 1845. The Record attacked him for having a Tractarian curate (adenla, box 2, file 4, Bishop Feild to William Scott, 20 May 1845); spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 9 October 1845. 21 Bridge, Three Sermons Preached in St John’s Church, 27. 22 Cathedral of St John the Baptist Archive, CA 1/2/2; Public Ledger (St John’s), 4 September 1840. 23 Frederick Jones, “Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge,” dcb, 8:103–4. 24 [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 12. 25 Patriot (St John’s), 31 May 1847, 25 May, 1 June 1850. spg, a193, Thomas Bridge, St John’s, to Peter Winser, 10 November 1847, A Letter to Peter Winser, Sen., Esq., (of Aquaforte), 3, 6. 26 “Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge.” Prowse was profuse with accolades for Bridge (History of Newfoundland, 469). For an assessment of Bridge’s evangelicalism, see Russell, “Evangelicalism in the Anglican Church in NineteenthCentury Newfoundland,” 104–38. 27 adenla, box 2, file 4, Feild to Scott, 20 May 1845; Collett, Church of England, 26; spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 5 March 1856; spg, Report for the Year 1856, lx; “Brief Memoir of the Venerable Archdeacon Bridge,” Colonial Church Chronicle, 107 (May 1856): 431. 28 adenla, box 2, file 4, Feild to Scott, 20 May 1845; Public Ledger (St John’s), 26 September 1845; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast; Reid, Trinity Church Bermuda, 45. 29 rpa, gn2/1a, vol. 40, James Crowdy to Archdeacon Wix, 27 February 1838. 30 “The Newfoundland Church Society,” Times (St John’s), 21 October 1840. 31 [Feild], “Account of the Anniversary of the Newfoundland Church Society, Held at St John’s, October 15th, 1845,” Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the

Notes to pages 59–63

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Western and Southern Coast, 22–8; Phillip Buckner, “Sir John Harvey,” dcb, 8:382, a salary that he managed to outspend. Phyllis Creighton, “Sir Bryan Robinson,” dcb, 11:761. Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland,” 74–5; spg, a217, Bishop Feild, St Georges, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 26 December 1859; a249, John Freer, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 10 June 1861; Carey, God’s Empire, 150–1. [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 34, reprinted in Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 25 (July 1849): 26–7; Feild, “Newfoundland: Endowment of the See,” Mission Field 16 (July 1871): 213; “The Labrador Mission,” Jerseites, St Aubin’s Bay, Jersey, 7 August 1849, Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 27 (September 1849): 97. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast … 1845, 22–35. Feild, Diary … 1844, 57. “Exact,” “exact a payment,” and “demand” were Feild’s own words. [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 30, 32. spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 15 February 1845. ncs, Report … 1847, 11. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 45. [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 29–36; ncs, Report … 1847, 9–12; ncs, Report … 1848, 10–11; ncs, Report … 1849, 10–11; spg, Report … for the Year 1847, lxvii–lxix; Report … for the Year 1849, lxv–lxvi; spg, a196, Bishop Feild, Steamer Unicorn, off Halifax, to Ernest Hawkins, 27 December 1848; “The Unicorn, Pioneer Steamer of the Cunard,” Saturday Budget, Montreal, 19 August 1893. Dickens, Christmas Carol, 87. Royal Gazette (St John’s), 2 November 1847; rpa, gn 2/1/a, vol. 46, 1847, 332– 420; vol. 47, 1848–9. Edward Newfoundland, Pall Mall, to provosts and fellows of Queens College, Oxford, 8 May 1844, Church of England Magazine 16 (January–June 1844): 43– 4. So also John Medley, while still in England, announced his intention to build a cathedral and departed from Exeter with “a substantial donation” to that end. At the Exeter farewell William Hart Coleridge presented the donation and “made clear that Medley was to carry the Tractarian and ecclesiological plans forward in his missionary diocese” (Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness, 43). adenla, box 2, file 4, Feild to William Scott, 7 August 1844. For an illustration of Spencer’s cathedral by James Purcell, see Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 73.

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Notes to pages 63–7

45 Feild, Diary … 1844, letters to William Scott, 11 July, 22 August, 78, 80. For a detailed account of Feild’s plans, worries, and woes relating to the building of his cathedral, “his most urgent architectural problem,” see Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 77–112. 46 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 12 June 1846, printed in British Magazine 30 (August 1846): 187–8. 47 Ibid.; Ecclesiologist 65 (April 1848): 274. 48 McCrea, Lost amid the Fogs, 164. 49 Trollope, Barchester Towers, 193; Ecclesiologist 65 (April 1848): 277–8. Barry Magrill judged that the tower of the structure was the icon of power and prestige, as with Medley’s and Fulford’s cathedrals in Fredericton and Montreal, and St James Cathedral in Toronto (Magrill, Commerce of Taste, 24, 58, 93). The chancel of Feild’s cathedral was not added until 1885; the tower was never built (Rowe, In Fields Afar, 34). 50 “Erection of New Cathedral,” Public Records Office, Colonial Office Correspondence, number 548, 3 January 1850, quoted in Coffman, Gothic Newfoundland, 112; Luke 14:28. 51 co 194/126, Bishop Feild to Lord Grey, 30 November 1846, appended note, quoted in Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland,” 166. 52 “Ecclesiology of Newfoundland,” William Grey to the Oxford Architectural Society, 13 January 1853, Ecclesiologist 96 (June 1853): 156. 53 Bridge to Ernest Hawkins, 26 August, 1846, quoted in Coffman, Gothic Newfoundland, 91. 54 Jones, Edward Feild Bishop of Newfoundland, 1844–1876, 21–2; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 125. 55 Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland,” 163–8. 56 Patriot (St John’s), 29 July 1847; spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 12 June 1846. 57 Patriot (St John’s), 3 August 1850; see also 24, 28 June, 26, 29 July, 26, 30 August 1847, 1 December 1849, 28 September 1850. 58 Public Ledger (St John’s), 29 June, 30 July 1847, 2, 9 February 1849. For Newfoundland newspapers and their editors, see Whelan, “Newspaper Press in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland.” 59 Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 68. 60 Times (St John’s), 3 June 1846. He copied a letter from the bishop of Salisbury arguing against participation in the Bible Society. See also [Feild], Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 49–54. As a riposte the first anniversary report included the endorsements of the society of Edward Stanley, bishop of Norwich, England, and Robert Daly, bishop of Cashel,

Notes to pages 67–9

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69 70 71 72 73 74

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Ireland (Public Ledger [St John’s], 26 March 1847). Bishop Medley at Fredericton had a similar view of “the Church.” He appreciated Dissenters donating to his cathedral, but “I told them … that I could not, if called upon, reciprocate their kindness by subscribing, e.g. to the erection of a meeting house” (Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal [London] 11 [May 1848]: 439– 40). Feild, “Charge Delivered to the Clergy of Bermuda … 1845.” Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 16, 48. Public Ledger (St John’s), 17 August 1847; Armour, “Religious Dissent in St John’s,” 2–3, 152, 180. Times (St John’s), 24 June 1840; Public Ledger (St John’s), 16 July 1847; Courier (St John’s), 10 July 1850. Public Ledger (St John’s), 15 August 1851. Similarly, at Harbour Grace for the Wesleyan chapel, Public Ledger (St John’s), 19 February 1850. Public Ledger (St John’s), 20 August 1847, 13 April 1852, 4 June 1852; Courier (St John’s), 6 August 1845, 27 May 1853; Times (St John’s), 18 March 1846. Newfoundland Guardian and Christian Intelligencer 1 (January 1851): 2. What enabled the Protestants to reach out beyond their walls, though they clung steadfastly to peculiar tenets, was their doctrine of the invisible church. The church was made up of true believers everywhere and could not be limited to any religious institution that contained both true and nominal believers. Such a belief enabled them to “transcend the inherent parochialism” of the activities of their denomination and view themselves as a part of a great body of believers who transcended churches and chapels of country and city, and who reached across continents and centuries. Tractarians countered that there was only one church and it had one form of church government – the visible and sacramental church of apostolic episcopacy descended from the ancient catholic church, albeit with a few branches (Turner, John Henry Newman, 41– 4; Chadwick, Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 41–2; Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 146–63. Times (St John’s), 24 March 1852. The Colonial Church Chronicle commented that Feild “naturally declines” such a proposition. Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 60 (June 1852): 467. Feild, Diary … 1844, 31–2. Ibid., 32. spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 9 October 1845. Collett, Church of England, 26; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 11. spg, a194, Bishop Spencer, to T.F.H. Bridge, 15 December 1842. Compare Bridge’s emphasis on the Protestant Reformation in 1841 in his Two Religions and his Tractarian changes to St John’s parish church in 1844 as described in Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 11–12.

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75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86

87

88 89

90

91 92 93 94

Notes to pages 69–75

spg, a196, Charles Blackman, to Ernest Hawkins, 7 April, 20 August 1848. Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 18. spg, a216, Feild, To the Congregation of St Thomas’s Church, 3–7. Public Ledger (St John’s), 6 September 1853. spg, a216, Bishop Feild to N.T. Bullock, 3 September 1853. Feild, Address to the Congregation of St Thomas’s Church, 3. See also St Thomas’s Address to Vicars on his departure thanking him for his “sound Evangelical principles” (Public Ledger [St John’s], 6 September 1853). Feild, An Address to the Congregation of St Thomas’s Church, 4–9. gn 2/2, box 41, 1853, January to June, 561–2, William Thomas to Bishop Feild, 13 June 1853. spg, a216, Bishop Feild to N.T. Bullock, 3 September 1853. gn2/2, box 41, 1853, 231–2, St Thomas’s to K.B. Hamilton, 25 August 1853. co 194, vol. 140, 1853, Despatches Offices and Individuals, b-665, 19–25, William Thomas et al., to Bishop Feild, 20 August 1853. co 194, vol. 140, 1853, 34, E.M. Archibald and H.W. Hoyles to Colonial Secretary, 22 September 1853; ibid., 37, Bishop Feild to Duke of Newcastle, 29 October 1853; ibid., 12–16, K.B. Hamilton to the Duke of Newcastle, 31 October 1853; Frederick Jones, “Ker Baille Hamilton,” dcb, 11:44. spg, a216, Bishop Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 3 November 1853; nss, reply by the committee to the 9 July 1853 letter of William Thomas, 19 July 1853, Colonial and Continental Church Society (c&ccs), General Committee Minute Book, 1850–1855, 565; Collett, Church of England, 26. Shaftesbury was also a vice-president of the Colonial Church and School Society (nss, Annual Report … 1853–1854, ii). Record, 25 May 1854. Three residents of St John’s to Earl of Shaftesbury, St John’s, 4 May 1854. The pamphlets could have been any two of the six pamphlets referenced in the controversy. They probably included Charles Simms from St John’s and George Berley from Liverpool. See Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, George Berley to Charles Simms, Liverpool, 24 April 1857. Record, 5 June 1854. There had been a rumour in 1851 that he might be appointed bishop of Nova Scotia (Times [St John’s], 1 March 1851). Royal Gazette (St John’s), 6 June 1854; Courier (St John’s), 10 June 1854. Ecclesiologist 65 (April 1848): 276. spg, a196, John Roberts to secretary of spg, 10 November 1846.

chapter three 1 Ryan, Fish out of Water, 49–51; Ryan, Ice Hunters, 121–36; Newfoundland census, 1845; Gunn, Political History of Newfoundland 1832–1864, 207. For migra-

Notes to pages 76–80

2

3 4

5 6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14

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tion northwards, see Staveley, “Population Dynamics in Newfoundland”; and Sanger, “Evolution of Sealing and the Spread of Settlement.” spg, a189, James Balfour, Harbour Grace, to William Morice, secretary, 13 November 1790, printed in “Contributions to the Church History of Newfoundland. IV,” Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 74 (August 1853): 47; and quoted in Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G., 92. Balfour’s assessment of immorality, though compromised by his personal interests, helped bolster a tenet of Newfoundland historiography, constructed as a basis not only for spiritual rescue, but also for political rescue (McLintock, Establishment of Constitutional Government in Newfoundland, 14–15; Newfoundland Royal Commission 1933 Report, 73, 78; Batstone, “Methodism in Newfoundland”; Wilson, Newfoundland and Its Missionaries, 138. Anspach, History of the Island of Newfoundland, 477–8. Feild, Diary … 1844, 27 July, 2 August, 45. See also Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 14–16, 144–6. But Cowan appeared to be a good pastor, visiting winter quarters, of which he gave a graphic description (spg, a195, extract of letter of G.B. Cowan, to Rev. James Taylor, Kimbolton, Huntingdonshire, 2 November 1844). spg, a193, Edward Wix to John Burt, Harbour Grace, July 1832; a193, Edward Wix to Anthony Hamilton, 13 September 1831. Record, 19 April 1847, 18 May 1848, 14, 18 June 1849, 28 January 1850. nss, Proceedings … 1849–1850, 18 (italics in original). Ford, Short History of St Paul’s, Harbor Grace, 34–8; spg, a225, Bertram Jones, Harbour Grace, 31 December 1858; Feild, Circular Letter from the Bishop of Newfoundland, 28 October 1845, 32; Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 294; Jones, Edward Feild Bishop of Newfoundland 1844–1876, 17; Murphy, “Trusteeism in Atlantic Canada.” Times (St John’s), 19 October 1850; Weekly Herald (Harbour Grace), 9 October 1850; Public Ledger (St John’s), 15 October 1850; spg, a215, Harbour Grace, bye to John Chapman, 3 October 1850. Quoted in Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 138. Bishop Spencer, in contrast, called him “that amiable and excellent Missionary” (spg, a249, Bishop Spencer, Bermuda, to A.M. Campbell, 2 December 1842). Feild, Order and Uniformity, 6; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 2, 32; Ford, Short History of St Paul’s, Harbor Grace, 51–2. Feild, Diary … 1844, 51–2, 55–6. spg, Account … 1827, 7; Bishop John Inglis, Journal, 11 June 1827, 69. Robert H. Taylor, “Brigus Mission, Newfoundland,” Mission Life 2 (January 1871): 92–4.

326

Notes to pages 80–5

15 Lench, Souvenir of the Brigus Methodist Jubilee, 3–8. 16 School of Oriental and African Studies (hereafter soas), London Missionary Society (hereafter lms), box 1, John Hillyard, Harbour Grace, to George Burder, 16 January 1804; John Hillyard, Twillingate, to the directors of the Missionary Society, 5 July 1804; Sunday Service of the Methodists; with Other Occasional Services, 241; Coke, Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of Methodist Missions, 30, letter of James Bulpit, 26 August 1804; [Bicentennial History Committee], Dissenting Church of Christ at St John’s 1775–1975, 43. It is likely that there were also a number of Congregationalists at Brigus, as at Twilllingate, as we shall see later. The only missionaries even remotely able to assist “in the depth of winter” were the single Methodist missionary in the land, James Bulpit at Carbonear, and the Congregationalist missionary, Rutton Morris, at St John’s. The Methodist missionary, John Remmington, had not yet arrived. 17 Winsor, Hearts Strangely Warmed, 11. 18 Ryan, Ice Hunters, 131–2, 135. 19 Tocque, Newfoundland, As It Was and As It Is in 1877, 121. 20 Greene, Wooden Walls among the Ice Flows, 50; Chafe, Chafe’s Sealing Book, 13, 34, 36, 93. 21 England, Vikings of the Ice, 204. 22 Ryan and Drake, Seals and Sealers, 71; Chafe, Chafe’s Sealing Book, 22. 23 Lench, Souvenir of the Brigus Methodist Jubilee, 6. Leamon, Brigus, 277. The book is Atmore, Methodist Memorial, which included a biography of Laurence Coughlan. For Atmore, see William Boswell Lowther, “Charles Atmore,” dnb, 2:233. 24 spg, Account … 1827, 71. 25 Feild, Diary … 1844, 56. 26 Bailey, Twenty-Five Years of St Augustine’s College, 37, 170; “S. Augustine’s, Canterbury,” Ecclesiologist 67 (August 1848): 5. Bishop Medley was awed that it was “reared on those ancient foundations of England’s primitive glory” (“Farewell Letter from the Bishop of Fredericton,” Bishop Medley, Exeter, to Ernest Hawkins, 23 August 1848, Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal [London] 15 [September 1848]: 104). 27 Robert H. Taylor, “Brigus Mission, Newfoundland, ”Mission Life 2 (January 1871): 92–3; spg, a196, J.M. Martine, Brigus, 3 April 1846. 28 spg, a196, J.M. Martine, Brigus, 3 April 1846. 29 Leamon, Brigus, 321. For his sealing record, see Chafe, Chafe’s Sealing Book, 48–56. 30 Troeltsch, Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2:724. 31 Robert H. Taylor, “Work in Newfoundland,” Mission Life 2 (December 1871): 717–18.

Notes to pages 85–8

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32 Robert H. Taylor, “Brigus Mission, Newfoundland,” Mission Life 2 (June 1871): 350; Taylor, Brigus, 8 May 1871, Occasional Papers 141 (September 1871): 6–8; Chafe, Chafe’s Sealing Book, 101, 105; [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Late Visit to Conception and Trinity Bays, 1864,” 9 November 1864. 33 Henry J. Indoe, “A Chapter in the History of Newfoundland Methodism,” Methodist Monthly Greeting, November 1896, 170: wmms, reel 35, 1823–55, Minutes of Newfoundland District Annual Meetings, “Reports of the Work of God in the Newfoundland District,” William Marshall, Green Bay [Notre Dame Bay], 1843. They continued their migratory spirituality on the Labrador for decades later. 34 “St Augustine’s College, Canterbury,” Mission Life 5 (1874): 487; Carey, God’s Empire, 272. Christopher Headon writes that the college was “founded upon Tractarian principles … Canadian dioceses received many of the Augustinians. The first student of the college, John Symes Williams, sent as a priest to Fredericton … The Tractarian bishops in Canada felt safe in accepting Augustinians” (Headon, “Influence of the Oxford Movement,” 61–3). 35 Robert H. Taylor, Brigus, August 1867, Occasional Papers 109 (March 1868): 2– 3; Taylor, Brigus, 31 October 1873, Occasional Papers 161 (April 1874): 2. 36 Quoted in Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 50. 37 Robert H. Taylor, Brigus, 31 October 1873, Occasional Papers 161 (April 1874): 2; Taylor, Brigus, 7 January 1876, Occasional Papers 179 (March 1876): 12; Taylor, Brigus, 22 January 1877, Occasional Papers 188 (April 1877): 7; Census of Newfoundland, 1869; Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1874. 38 Robert H. Taylor, Brigus, 31 October 1873, Occasional Papers 161 (April 1874): 6; Taylor, Brigus, 7 January 1876, Occasional Papers 179 (March 1876): 7–8; Taylor, Brigus, 22 January 1877, Occasional Papers 188 (April 1877): 8; Taylor, Brigus, 5 February 1879, Occasional Papers 205 (May 1879): 7; Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 34. Tractarians saw evangelicals as disloyal to both the Church of England and the King (Chadwick, Spirit of the Oxford Movement, 9– 10). 39 Robert H. Taylor, Brigus, 5 February 1879, Occasional Papers 205 (May 1879): 8–9; Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1884. 40 Reformed Church Record 1 (July 1881): 102; 4 (April 1885): 29; “Reformed Church of England,” Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador (hereafter enl), 1:436–7; Price, History of the Formation and Growth of the Reformed Episcopal Church, 236–7. 41 uc Archives, wy 280, box 1, Reformed Anglican Church, New Harbour, Trinity Bay, Reformed Episcopal Church I, Register of Services, 1887–1895. See, for instance, Charles F. Hubbard, August 1887–January 1888. 42 Feild married Sophia Bevan, the widow of J.G. Mountain, in 1867 (Elinor

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45 46 47 48 49

50

51

52 53 54

55 56

Notes to pages 88–91

Senior, “Edward Feild,” dcb, 10:278; Walford, Hardwicke’s Annual Biography for 1857, 126). spg, a194, Bishop Spencer, Journal, 22 May 1840; Andrews, Heritage of a Newfoundland Outport, 141–3. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 266; Robert H. Taylor, Brigus, winter 1875, Occasional Papers 169 (January 1875): 2; Taylor, Brigus, 7 January 1876, Occasional Papers 179 (March 1876): 9; Taylor, Brigus, 16 March 1876, Occasional Papers 182 (June 1876): 4. spg, a194, Bishop Spencer, Twillingate, to A.M. Campbell, 1 August 1841; Churchman’s Companion 28 (April 1883): 319–20. Arthur C. Waghorne, “A Newfoundland Parish,” Mission Life, 1879, 230, 318– 19, 322. Arthur C. Waghorne, New Harbour, 17 July 1883, Little Papers 4 (April 1884): 79–80. Ibid. Arthur C. Waghorne, “A Newfoundland Parish,” Mission Life, 1879, 320; Waghorne, New Harbour, 23 January 1879, Occasional Papers 205 (May 1879): 5; Yates, Buildings, Faith and Worship, 132, 139. Headon noted that “St Augustinians reported back to their old college with pride at the establishment of weekly communions” (Headon, “Influence of the Oxford Movement,” 170). The Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1884, recorded as members of the “Reformed Church of England”: 108 at New Harbour, 64 at Dildo, and 34 at Green’s Harbour. The branch of Anglicanism did not last, but appears to have largely been rolled into Methodism, as at New Harbour (wy 280, box 1, Reformed Anglican Church, F. John Adams, 84th Anniversay of St John’s United Church of the New Harbour–Dildo congregation, 1 December 1969). Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 83, 135; Jones, “Rouse’s ‘Trivial Round,’” 93; Jones, “The Early Opposition to Bishop Field [sic] of Newfoundland,” 38. Feild did ordain him deacon, Weekly Herald (Harbour Grace), 1 July 1846. A.S., Long Island, Placentia Bay, letter to the editor, Public Ledger (St John’s), 5 May 1840. Record, 30 November 1846, 19 April 1847, 14 June 1849. Ibid.; letter of Aubrey George Spencer, bishop of Jamaica, 28 May 1846, Occasional Paper 20 (July 1846): 2. Unlike Bishop Medley who continued to support the nss (Carey, God’s Empire, 158). Roberts, Glorious Title, preface, 55; Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 116, 135. Roberts, Glorious Title, preface, 20–1, 29, 40, 53, 55, 63. This pamphlet, purchased by Rouse 21 September, is Roberts’s first, since Rouse says that the

Notes to pages 93–100

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58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65

66

67 68 69 70

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second, published by 20 October, references Robert Prowse, 124. The first does not. spg, Sermon … 1828, 78–9; Census of Newfoundland, 1845; Feild, Sermon Preached … 1929. Bay de Verde with Roman Catholics and Anglicans, and hardly a Methodist was not common in Conception Bay. spg, a196, John Roberts, Bishop’s Court, St John’s, 23 June 1846; Roberts, Bay de Verde, 21 July 1846, 10 November 1846. spg, a196, John Roberts, Bay de Verde, 26 September 1846. Weekly Herald (Harbour Grace), 23 September 1846; Cadigan, Hope and Deception in Conception Bay, 131–8. Weekly Herald (Harbour Grace), 23 September 1846; [Lowell], Fresh Hearts That Failed, 39; Courier (St John’s), 12 January 1848. spg, a196, John Roberts, Bay de Verde, to Edward Feild, 9 March 1847; Edward Feild to Ernest Hawkins, St John’s, 26 March 1847. Even Feild’s cousin, Samuel Feild, had heard in England that he was “by many, loaded with contumely and reproach” (Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 63, 239). Mission Life (October 1871): 602; Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 99, 124. Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, x–xi, 2, 7, 221–3. Weekly Herald (Harbour Grace), 1 July 1846. Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 99, 106, 130, 138. For over two years he held out on his refusal to minister and finally obtained title for Bishop Feild to the Grates Cove church for one shilling on 15 December 1849 (188–9). Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 150–2, 154, 157, 177–83, 202–3, 293. Rouse also refused R. Cosh baptism of his child unless he paid a dollar (159). Feild’s explanation later amounted to a claim that there was no fee for baptism in principle, only in fact. The church member was not paying for the baptism itself, but rather for the clergyman who carried out the baptism ([Feild], Address on the System of the Church Society, 4–5). Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 200–1. spg, a225, Oliver Rouse, Bay de Verde, Christmas, 1858; a226, Michaelmas, 1859; Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1836, 1845, 1857, 1869, 1874. “The Late Rev. Oliver Rouse,” Bishop Feild, Bay de Verde, 11 September 1869, Mission Field 14 (November 1868): 343. 1 spg, a195, Bishop Feild, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 20 December 1844.

chapter four 1 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Missions of the Northern Coast, 1846, 5. 2 wmms, reel 19, 1824–5, James Hickson, Bonavista, 25 October 1824. 3 wmms, reel 23, 1832–5, William Ellis, Bonavista, 12 August 1834.

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Notes to pages 101–5

4 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Missions of the Northern Coast, 1846, 6–9. Census of Newfoundland, 1836, 1845. 5 spg, a192, George Coster, Bonavista, 4 November 1826; a193, Edward Wix, St John’s, 13 September 1831. Parish church Anglicans in England often derisively described evangelical Anglicans as “fanatical” ([East], Evangelical Rambler, 1824, tract 37). 6 nss, Proceedings … 1842–1843, 10; Proceedings … 1843–1844, 23–4; Proceedings … 1844–1845, 21; Proceedings … 1846–1847, 26; Proceedings, 1848–1849, 20. 7 spg, a230, Charles Rock West, Salvage, 1863; a240, H.M. Skinner, Salvage, 30 June 1872; Feild, Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland, 1866, 19. However, West was able to increase the number of monthly communicants from sixteen to fifty at Salvage (Mission Field 13 [November 1868]: 323, Charles Rock West, Salvage, 31 March 1868). 8 Moreton, Life and Work, 21; Handcock, “Soe longe as there comes noe women,” 116–17; Ryan, Fish out of Water, 62–3. 9 Moreton, Life and Work, 59; Winsor, Good Workmanship and Lasting Devotion, 13–16; Hollett, Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy, 141–4. 10 spg, a226, Julian Moreton, Greenspond, 31 March 1860; [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Late Visit to Conception and Trinity Bays, 1864,” 9 November 1864; [Feild], “The Bishop of Newfoundland’s Visit to Conception and Trinity Bays,” 60; Bishop Feild, “Plea for Colonial Dioceses,” quoted in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 188–9; Finley, “Gothic Revival and the Victorian Church in New Brunswick,” 116–17, 205–12. The only interior furnishing that the former bishop Spencer provided for each of the six churches of Placentia Bay was a pulpit (spg, a194, Bishop Aubrey Spencer to Ernest Hawkins, assistant secretary, 12 June 1841). 11 spg, Account … 1827, 80. 12 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 114. 13 spg, a222, Julian Moreton, Greenspond, to Bishop Feild, 31 December 1854. 14 Leader, “The Hon. Reverend William Grey,” 91; Grey, “Ecclesiology of Newfoundland,” 159; “St John’s Cathedral, Newfoundland,” Ecclesiologist 65 (April 1848): 275; “Colonial Church Architecture: Newfoundland,” Ecclesiologist 70 (February 1849): 215–16; Scott, “On Wooden Churches,” 21, 23; Times (St John’s), 6 December 1848. 15 Scott, “On Wooden Churches,” 21; Grey, “Ecclesiology of Newfoundland,” 157. 16 spg, a226, Julian Moreton, Greenspond, 31 March 1860. See also the photos in Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 143. 17 Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 142. 18 wmms, reel 27, 1842–5, George Ellidge, Bonavista, 19 December 1842; spg, a225, Julian Moreton, Greenspond, 30 September 1858.

Notes to pages 105–8

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19 spg, a225, Julian Moreton, Greenspond, 31 March 1859; a226, 30 June 1859. Dyer mentioned, for instance, that he walked “about six miles over the ice on the sea” from Greenspond to an adjacent island on 27 March 1858 to distribute tracts among the sealers. This would have been Pool’s Island (White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 13, 14, 27 February 1858). 20 Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1845, 1857, 1869, 1874; spg, a226, Julian Moreton, Greenspond, 31 December 1859; White, “Robert Dyer Diary.” 21 Newfoundland Express (St John’s), 27 September 1853; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 85–6; White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 29 August 1853; Leader, “Hon. Reverend William Grey,” 103. Moreton said he was responsible for the construction of the “handsome and substantial new church” on Pinchard’s Island (Life and Work, 63). 22 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 85–6. 23 White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 1 September 1851. 24 Ibid., 16 November 1845, 6 December 1846; Harding, Sermons, 32, 125. 25 It was not until the 1870s and the move to Wesleyville that the Methodists made great inroads on Swain’s Island (Winsor, “By Their Works,” 7). 26 As James Gilchrist called them, spg, Report … 1843, xxxv. 27 Moreton, Life and Work, vi, 45–7. 28 Ibid., 23–4, 26–7. Gerald Sider had a difficult time explaining away the people “possessed of a dignity” that Julian Moreton found in Greenspond (Gerald Sider, Between History and Tomorrow, 152–4, 207–8, 212). These fishermen of “studied independent bearing” did not fit into his system, the world of merchant capital. He thus made the most of the exception to their dignity – “the moment they are eager after some advantage.” He then jumped from Moreton’s book to the use of the word after in Newfoundland idiom, saying that it “usually” implies a future action. This is simply incorrect. As the Dictionary of Newfoundland English states, after in Newfoundland idiom refers to a “completed action” (dne, 5). His quote, “I’m after going to see the merchant” means that I have already gone to see the merchant, not that I intend to go. His further statement that its idiomatic use “almost always” refers to a future encounter with “the powerful and dominant” or with “poverty or helplessness” is fanciful. It is strange that he would fix on the use of the word by Moreton who uses after as a preposition, as people do everywhere, including people in Newfoundland. To take that regular prepositional use of the word in the expository writing of an English missionary and argue that it has some veiled relationship to a Newfoundland idiom is a parody of analysis. This positing of farfetched meanings in “the logic” of Newfoundland culture to support a theory of the domination of merchant capital shows that his theory

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31

32 33 34

35 36 37

38

Notes to pages 109–12

is not grounded in evidence but is as dandelion fluff floating in the wind. It is surprising how it takes root. Moreton, Life and Work, 57. rpa, letter of Richard Newman, Twillingate, to Harry Newman, 30 June 1829. Feild concluded similarly about settlers at Long Point, on the Quebec Lower North Shore, just west of Blanc Sablon. He figured that “the attractions” for those who left “the beautiful downs and combs of Dorsetshire” must be “in their entire liberty and independence, with the full supply of all things absolutely necessary” ([Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 12). White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 22 September 1848, 6 December 1849, 8 February, 6 December 1852, 10 April 1853. See also 24 February 1842, 15 October, 6 December 1845, 17 May 1846, 15 August 1847, 25 March, 1, 2 April, 21 September 1848, 14, 18 March, 17 August 1849; 21, 24 April 1850, 19 September 1852, 17 July 1853. Ibid., 15 April 1845, 18 September 1850. Ibid., 8 August 1845; Dayer, “Report for 1846”; White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 27 February 1851, 27 February 1855, 27 February 1858. White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 6 November 1845, 7 November 1846, 12 November 1847, April 1849 report; 21 April 1848, 30 October 1852; Richmond, Dairyman’s Daughter. White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 22 November 1845; Report for May 1846; 3 October 1847. White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 15 April 1845, 9 January 1852, 2 September 1853, 23 May–3 June 1849. White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 14 June 1853; [Hamilton], Comments upon a Recent Resolution, 7. Hamilton wrote to the nss committee, 22 March 1855 “freely expressing his opinion of the proceedings of the Bishop of Newfoundland, and warning the Committee against any steps which might compromise the principles of the Society.” The committee replied to the governor that they had “by no means changed their own estimate of the Bishop’s principles and practices,” but they were trying to follow a path that would “avoid perpetual discord” with him (nss, 3 April 1855, c&ccs, General Committee Minute Book, 1850–1855, 842). For the controversy between the governor and the Church Society, see chapter 6. White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 28 December 1853, 6 January 1854; Journal of the House of Assembly, 1850, 23–4; Hollett, “Bishop Edward Feild,” 34–40. To Feild, “the Church” referred to only the Church of England. For how this played out politically in the impetus for responsible government, see Jones, “Bishop Feild,” 121, 108–33, 153–61, 170–90; Greene, “Influence of Religion in the Politics of Newfoundland”; Greene, Between Damnation and Starvation.

Notes to pages 112–15

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39 nss, Robert Dyer, letter to committee, 2 November 1852, c&ccs, General Committee Minute Book, 1850–1855, 428. Dyer, in a 22 June 1856 letter to the nss, again requested removal to another colony because of “the difficulties of his position” (16 September 1856, c&ccs, General Committee Minute Book, 1855– 1861, 185). 40 nss, Annual Report … 1869, 57; Millman, “Life in Newfoundland,” 38. 41 White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 2–30 September 1850, 15 September–5 October 1851, 5 September–10 October 1852, 18 June–24 July, 9 September 1853. 42 Ibid., 27 August 1855; spg, a225, Julian Moreton, Greenspond, Quarterly Report, 30 June 1856; nss, Annual Report … 1854–55, 72–3. Bishop Feild also complained to Dyer that Moreton was not getting his due in the nss report of Dyer’s labours (nss, 13 December 1854 letter of Robert Dyer to nss committee, 16 January 1855, c&ccs, General Committee Minute Book, 1850–1855, 774). The discrepancy is probably due to additions by the the nss editor, Anna Johnston, in her study of the lms, noted that in reading missionary literature one must maintain a “skeptical double-vision,” since the relation between the original letters of missionaries and the published text of these letters is “always uncertain” due to “corrections, additions, and deletions” (Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860, 32–4). 43 White, “Robert Dyer Diary,” 22 September 1850; Hayes, Anglicans in Canada, 122; Balleine, History of the Evangelical Party, 219–20. 44 Moreton, Life and Work, 6–7. 45 See Hollett, Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy, 152–85. 46 William Wheeler, John Colbourne, John Smith, Thomas Hicks, Jeremiah Hicks, Jeremiah Rigs, James Stuckles, Joseph Stuckles, John Sergent, John Moors, Caleb Smith, William Manuel, William Clark, Christopher Eyers, Samuel Jeans, Richard Stuckles, Twillingate, to lms, [ca 1798], Missionary Magazine 33 (18 February 1799): 80–1. For John Jones, the Congregational missionary at St John’s, see [Bicentennial History Committee], Dissenting Church of Christ at St John’s, 4–39. 47 1 lms, Report, 1799, xvii; lms, Report, 1803, 23–4; soas, lms, box 1, John Moors, Twillingate, to William Kingsbery [Kingsbury], 29 October 1802; John Hillyard, Twillingate, to the directors of the Missionary Society, 5 July 1804; sprk, Account, 1779, 4–5; John Hillyard, Twillingate, to Samuel Greathead, 17 October 1799, Missionary Magazine 44 (January 1800): 40–1. 48 Rivers, “First Evangelical Tract Society,” 2–3, 6, 21–2. 49 spg, a192, John Chapman, Twillingate, to Anthony Hamilton, secretary, 17 December 1831; Beamish, Hillier, and Johnstone, Mansions and Merchants, 131–49, 177–8; Handcock, “Soe longe as there comes noe women,” 134; Manuel, St Peter’s Anglican Church, 6–12.

334

Notes to pages 115–18

50 “William Harding Diary, 1793–1877”; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk” Church Ship, 1849, 24–5. 51 The 1836 census for Twillingate Island listed twenty-one Dissenters, “chiefly, if not altogether Baptists and Independents [Congregationalists].” The Baptists of the Maritimes reported, “In Newfoundland, nearly a whole congregation of people renounced infant sprinkling, convinced that it had no scripture authority” (Baptist Missionary Magazine of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick 3 [September 1836]: 202). 52 spg, a192, John Chapman, Twillingate, to Anthony Hamilton, secretary, 15 December 1827; John Chapman, Twillingate, to Archdeadon Wix, 11 June 1832; spg, Report … 1827, 83. 53 rpa, Richard Newman, Twillingate, to John Hall, 18 June 1827; Richard Newman, Twillingate, to John Newman, 10 July 1827; Richard Newman, Twillingate, to Martha Newman, 13 August 1828; Richard Newman, Twillingate, to Harry Newman, 30 June 1829. 54 Evans, Sketch of the Denominations, xxii, 174. 55 rpa, letter of Richard Newman, Twillingate, to Martha Newman, 13 August 1828; Richard Newman, Twillingate, to John Newman, 17 December 1827. 56 [East], Evangelical Rambler, 1824, tracts 37, 38, and 40. 57 1851 UK census, cited in McDonald, “Poole, 1815–1881,” 89; Biggs, Wesleys and the Early Dorset Methodists, 19, 32–4, 54–5. 58 spg, a193, John Chapman, Twillingate, to Bishop Aubrey George Spencer, 10 October 1840; John Chapman, Twillingate, to Bishop Aubrey George Spencer, 13 October 1841; a190, David Rowland, St John’s, to Anthony Hamilton, secretary, 29 January 1817, “On Marriages in Newfoundland”; [Bicentennial History Committee], Dissenting Church of Christ at St John’s, 34–5. 59 Public Ledger (St John’s), 4 August 1843; Weekly Herald (Harbour Grace), 16 October 1850; Times (St John’s), 19 October 1850; spg, a215, Harbour Grace, bye to John Chapman, 3 October 1850. 60 Manuel, St Peter’s Anglican Church, Twillingate, 9–12. 61 spg, Report … 1845, xlviii. 62 Bishop Feild, Twillingate, to Canon Seymour, 14 November 1868, printed in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 235. 63 Bishop Feild, Twillingate, to Julian Moreton, 23 November 1868, printed in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 237–8. Moreton also had to provide “occasional services” to the coal miners on the island, “about thirty Europeans” (Moreton, Life and Work, viii; Colonial Church Chronicle [London] 226 [April 1866]: 137). 64 Circular Letter from the Bishop of Newfoundland, 28 October 1845, 32; spg, a194, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, Quarterly Report to Bishop Feild, Midsummer

Notes to pages 118–24

65 66

67 68 69

70

71

72

73 74 75 76 77

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1855. Pew rents were not abolished until 1933 (Manuel, St Peter’s Anglican Church, Twillingate, 37). spg, Quarterly Paper 98 (October 1856): 4. spg, a228, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1861; a232, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1863; a234, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 2 May 1866; a238, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1869. spg, a194, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 29 June 1846; “Jubilee of Reverend J.S. Peach,” Methodist Monthly Greeting, July 1890, 105. [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk” Church Ship … 1849, 107–8. wy 200, Fogo, box 2, “Green Bay Circuit Book, 1846–1868,” 1853; W.J.S., obituary of “Father Peter Samways,” Methodist Monthly Greeting, June 1907, 13; Provincial Wesleyan, 8, 22 April, 15, 22 July 1868. For the Slades at Twillingate, see also Clarke, History of the Isles, 54. [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 3 September 1857. W.A. Elder, missionary at Fogo at the time, said that the Hawk came in the harbour “with drooping prow, and only kept afloat by constant pumping” (W.A. Elder, “Work in Newfoundland, ”Mission Life 3 [1872]: 637). [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk” Church Ship, 1849, 19– 20; [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1859,” 1–5 July 1859; spg, a228, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1859. On the south side of the harbour they met in a school ([Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 63). The American Episcopal clergyman Louis Legrand Noble, on his way north with the artist Frederic Edwin Church, was in Twillingate on 3 July, the Sunday of Bishop Feild’s visit (Noble, After Icebergs with a Painter, 103–4). spg, a228, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1860, 31 December 1861; “Northern Circuit Court, Twillingate, 3 September 1860: The Case of the Rev. Thomas Boone vs David Young, John Young and Abraham Young,” Public Ledger (St John’s), 21 September 1860; Reid, Trinity Church Bermuda, 51; John Reay, “Methodism in Green Bay” [Notre Dame Bay], Methodist Monthly Greeting, December 1899, 7. Reprinted from the Provincial Wesleyan, 1875; see the Wesleyan, 6 May 1876. spg, a228, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1860, 31 December 1861. Ibid. spg, a194, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, Quarterly Report to Bishop Feild, midsummer 1855. spg, a238, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1869. Ibid.

336

Notes to pages 124–8

78 Ibid. 79 A Methodist clergyman in Conception Bay noted in 1843 that “a great proportion of the people of Twillingate were not brought up Churchmen, but Dissenters” (Public Ledger [St John’s], 1 September 1843). 80 Public Ledger (St John’s), 17 August 1847 (italics in Ledger). 81 Thomas Harris, “Revival in Newfoundland,” Twillingate, 24 January 1860, Provincial Wesleyan, 6 May 1860. 82 Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 112. 83 Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 49–66; Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 50–118; Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 130–61; Westfall, Two Worlds, 19–49; Hollett, Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy. 84 spg, a222, Ernest A. Sall, Bonavista, 31 December 1854; a233, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1864; a238, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1869. 85 Troeltsch, Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2:724; Clark, Church and Sect in Canada, 30, 38, 145–61; Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, 89–93, 186; Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity. 86 spg, a238, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1869; a240, Walter R. Smith, Exploits, 31 December 1871; a232, George Seymour Chamberlain, Moreton’s Harbour, 14 April 1864; letter of Feild, printed in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 170. 87 qel, Peyton Family Papers, Coll-150, 4.01.003, “Circulars, Relief for the Poor, 1851 to 1868,” John Peyton, Twillingate, to the commissioners of the poor, St John’s, 13 October 1853. 88 spg, a193, John Chapman, Twillingate, to A.M. Campbell, secretary, 19 December 1839; John Chapman, Twillingate, to Bishop Spencer, 13 October 1841; a194, Bishop Spencer, St John’s, to A.M. Campbell, secretary, 16 November 1841. Remarkably, Spencer also noted that “a planter” at Twillingate “who was recently at the point of death, but who has since recovered, has bequeathed his whole substance amounting to £2000” to the spg “to whose ministration he has felt himself indebted during fifty years for all the comforts of our blessed religion.” Joseph Munden, a servant of John or Thomas Colbourne, had already “bequeathed an amount sufficient for placing the Ten Commandments in the Church at Twillingate, and also the Creed,” but had not died (spg, a192, John Chapman, Twillingate, to Anthony Hamilton, secretary, 17 December 1831). Gregg Finley noted that these items were “a popular eighteenth century liturgical convention” (Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 118). 89 spg, Report … 1845, xlix; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Missions

Notes to pages 129–32

90

91 92 93 94

95

96 97 98

99 100 101 102

337

of the Northern Coast, 1846, 11; Manuel, St Peter’s Anglican Church, Twillingate, 9, 11. John Reay, “Methodism in Green Bay,” Methodist Monthly Greeting, November 1899, 12. Reprinted from the Provincial Wesleyan, 1875; see the Wesleyan, 6 May 1876; Smith, History of the Methodist Church, 2:370–1; Public Ledger (St John’s), 4 August 1843. spg, Report … 1845, xlviii. spg, a238, Thomas Boone, Twillingate, 31 December 1869, 31 December 1870. spg, a194, Bishop Spencer, Twillingate, to A.M. Campbell, secretary, 1 August 1841. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Missions of the Northern Coast, 1846, 12; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk” Church Ship … 1849, 103–4; Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the spg, 858; Royal Gazette (St John’s), 14 November 1848. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G., 858; Kearley, Queen’s College 1841– 1991, 161; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 66. John Kingwell’s father, John Kingwell Sr, was an evangelical Anglican nss schoolmaster ordained by Bishop Spencer (spg, a194, Bishop Spencer to A.M. Campbell, secretary, 26 April 1841; spg, a194, William Jeynes to T.F.H. Bridge, 21 December 1840). wmms, reel 30, 1852–1853, Edmund Botterell, St John’s, 24 August 1853, Journal of a Trip to Twillingate. Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1859, 185–6; Burden, “Brief History of … Little Bay Islands,” 4; Census of Newfoundland 1857, 1869. John Reay, “Methodism in Green Bay,” Methodist Monthly Greeting, November 1899, 12, reprinted from the Provincial Wesleyan, 1875; see the Wesleyan, 6 May 1876. spg, a192, John Chapman, Twillingate, to Anthony Hamilton, secretary, 28 October 1826. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada, 145–72. wmms, reel 32, 1858–64, Henry Daniel, St John’s, 26 October 1858; Pitt, Windows of Agates, 87–88. Thomas Harris, Twillingate, “Revival in Newfoundland,” 24 January 1860, Provincial Wesleyan, 6 May 1860; wy 100, box 1, 1829–73, “Newfoundland District Journal, 1859–1873,” 1867 Annual District Meeting, St John’s, 23 May 1867. Francis Scott was sent there in the summer of 1867. He was not ordained, but recommended as a candidate for ministry a year later (wy 100, box 1, 1829–73, “Newfoundland District Journal, 1859–1873,” 1868 Annual District Meeting, St John’s, 21 May 1868).

338

Notes to pages 132–6

103 Thomas Fox, Catalina, 16 October 1861, “Labrador Mission,” Provincial Wesleyan, 19 February 1862. 104 wmms, reel 30, 1852–1853, John Brewster, [Twillingate], Green Bay, 10 May 1853. For his class list in 1859, see Mercer, Century of Methodism in Twillingate and Notre Dame Bay, 130. 105 wy 200, Exploits, box 3, “Mission Book Exploits Burnt Island, 1859–1895,” Little Bay Islands, 4 April 1863; “Obituary of Mrs Fanny Cox, Little Bay Islands, 7 July 1914,” Methodist Monthly Greeting, 20 August 1914; Burden, “Brief History of … Little Bay Islands,” 5–6. 106 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 68–70. 107 Ibid., 70–4. 108 In 1817 Fogo had 265 Protestants and 80 Roman Catholics, Twillingate had 847 Protestants (spg, a191, John Leigh, Twillingate, to A.M. Hamilton, secretary, 17 April 1817). 109 spg, a194, Bishop Spencer’s Journal, May–June 1840, 22 May 1840. 110 spg, a192, John Chapman, Twillingate, to Anthony Hamilton, secretary, 28 October 1826, 6 December 1829, 17 December 1831; a193, John Chapman, Twillingate, to Anthony Hamilton, secretary, 19 December 1839; a194, Bishop Aubrey Spencer, Twillingate, to A.M. Campbell, secretary, 1 August 1841; a196, list of missions “visited by the Lord Bishop in 1841” in “Ecclesiastical Notitia of the Rural Deanery of Trinity in the Diocese of Newfoundland, 1842.” For the Slades of Fogo, see Clarke, History of the Isles, 147–50. Bishop Inglis said in 1827 that James Bell taught Sunday school and “reads with great propriety to a respectable congregation” (spg, Account, 10). 111 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 6 September 1844, 24 May 1845, 19 June 1845; Bishop Feild, the Hawk, to Ernest Hawkins, 9 July 1845. Bowman later asked to return and accompanied his request with “a testimonial signed by Archbishop of Canterbury,” but Feild refused him outright (spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 28 November 1849, 1 March 1850). 112 Feild, Diary … 1844, 38–9; Public Ledger (St John’s), 24 September 1844. 113 Templeman, Newfoundland Almanac, 1847, 23; James Winter, letter to the editor, Public Ledger (St John’s), 18 June 1847 (italics in Ledger). 114 James Winter, letter to the editor, Public Ledger (St John’s), 18 June 1847 (italics in Ledger). 115 a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 20 June 1848. 116 Letter of Bishop Feild to Edward Coleridge, “The Church Ship, Fogo, 2 September 1846,” printed in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 51–2.

Notes to pages 137–9

339

117 spg, a222, Ernest A. Sall, Bonavista, 30 September 1854. 118 spg, a222, Ernest A. Sall, Bonavista, 31 December 1854; a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 19 July 1844. 119 Davena Davis, dcb, “James Butler Knill Kelly,” 13: 541; Kelly, “Perils in the Deep, 1869,” 267, 271. 120 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 11 November 1858. 121 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 15 November 1854. 122 See Bridge, Two Religions; Bridge, Letter to Peter Winser; Record, 14 June 1849, 28 February 1850, 18 November 1850 (reprinted in Times [St John’s], 8 January 1851), 30 December 1850 (letter of Bridge to the editor of the Record, 5 December, 1850 – the editor had called Bridge “a lapsed person”), 23 March 1854. “One who had been sent out there long before by this very Society, as a type of an Evangelical missionary, was a chief means of misleading it. Either himself bewildered in that evil mist of error, falsely called by some, “Church principles,” or perceiving the ebb of the evangelical tide, and the flow of the wave of High Church notions, on the crest of which he might be borne to ecclesiastical honours and preferments, he anticipated the change in the Episcopal dynasty” (Record, 8 January 1850). Of course, Bridge was not sent out as a nss missionary, but came as a tutor to Governor Thomas Cochrane’s son (Frederick Jones, “Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge,” dcb, 8:103). 123 spg, a197, Ernest Sall, Bonavista, to Ernest Hawkins, 30 June, 31 December 1855, 31 March 1856. 124 When Bishop Spencer was a missionary in Trinity, he used preaching without notes to compete with the Methodists, and, while disparaging it, recognized its appeal, especially in an oral culture: “Extemporaneous preaching is another engine very potent with the vulgar who are always too credulous to false points and apt to receive the most unconnected and unmeaning jargon delivered with the declaration of affected passion, if not as the immediate product of inspiration, at least … the unpremeditated language of affection and truth.” spg, a192, Aubrey George Spencer, Trinity, 24 January, 5 April 1821. 125 Public Ledger (St John’s), 23 August 1850; Sailing Directions for Newfoundland, 214. Likely Stephen Lawlor (Tocque, Newfoundland Almanack, 1849, 27). 126 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 15 November 1854, 8 December 1857. 127 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 75; wmms, reel 30, 1852–1853, Edmund Botterell, St John’s, 24 August 1853, Journal of a Trip to Twillingate. 128 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 25 June 1860; Public Ledger (St John’s), 18 September 1855.

340

Notes to pages 139–42

129 spg, a222, William A. Elder, Fogo, Christmas 1854. 130 Elder was ordained a deacon at the cathedral in St John’s in 1853 (Public Ledger [St John’s], 31 May 1853). 131 Finley, “Habits of Reverence and Awe.” The people built a Protestant church at Fogo with galleries and a high pulpit. It was ready for James Harvey when he arrived in 1841. Protestants from Twillingate also “contributed handsomely” to its construction (spg, a193, John Chapman to secretary, 2 March 1841). 132 spg, a197, William A. Elder, Fogo, “Journal Extracts,” 1 October 1855. spg, Report … 1855, simply stated that Elder “appears very anxious for the spiritual progress of his people,” lxx. 133 spg, a218, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 13 September 1860; a227, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, 1 October 1860, 30 December 1860; a230, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, January 1863, January 1864; a233, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, January 1865. 134 spg, a227, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, 1 October 1860; a230, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, January 1863. 135 spg, a226, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, 11 April 1860. 136 Johnson was ordained deacon in 1858 (Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G., 858). The name of the college was changed from Theological Institution to Theological Institute in the mid-1850s. 137 [Medley], Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese … 1853, 9; spg, a230, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, January 1863. 138 spg, a232, George Seymour Chamberlain, Moreton’s Harbour, 14 April 1864. 139 [Keble], Christian Year, 1: title page, v; spg, a234, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, 31 December 1865. So Bishop Medley at Fredericton also spoke of the Church of England as a refuge from the world at the consecration of his cathedral: “How sweet and heavenly is it to turn from the jarring interests of this feverish world, maddened by excitement … to this haven of peace” ([Medley], Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese … 1853, 24). 140 Book of Common Prayer, 11; Acts 3:8; “The Calendar with the Table of Lessons,” 6 April, Second Lesson, Acts 3, Communion and Other Services. 141 “Voyage of the Coadjutor Bishop of Newfoundland,” 1870, Mission Field 16 (March 1871): 80; Gospel Missionary 47 (November 1874): 162. 142 The 1857 census reported no Methodists for Fogo, but there were at least twelve there (wy 200, Fogo, box 2, “Green Bay Circuit Book, 1846–1868,” 1853). The 1869 census reported 608 Church of England and 139 Methodists (Census of Newfoundland, 1857, 1869). 143 wmms, reel 28, 1846–1848, John S. Peach, Twillingate, 24 November, 1846; reel 30, 1852–1853, Edmund Botterell, St John’s, 24 August 1853, Journal of

Notes to pages 142–4

144 145

146 147 148 149

150

151

152

153 154

341

a Trip to Twillingate; Fogo Correspondence, 17 August 1853, Courier (St John’s), 31 August 1853. E.B. [Edmund Botterell, chairman of the Newfoundland District], St John’s, letter to editor, Provincial Wesleyan, 10 April 1861, 1 May 1861. wy 500, “Journal of Thomas Fox, 1851–1877,” 14 December [1850], 23 June, 5 July, 3, 7, 19 August, 13 September 1851, 2, 26 January, 15 February, 21 July 1852, 19 January, 19 June 1854, 12 January, 30 July 1855, 28 January 1858, 10 March, 10 July, 17 November 1862. wy 500, “Journal of Thomas Fox, 1851–1877,” 10 July 1862. spg, a249, Bishop Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 17 November 1863; spg, a233, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, January 1865. Public Ledger (St John’s), 2 March 1847. Methodist Monthly Greeting, January 1903, 10; Mott, Newfoundland Men, 73; Mercer, Century of Methodism, 39, 132; Chaulk, Snippets in Time, 126–38; G.M. Story, “Edwin Duder,” dcb, 11:284; Bishop Feild, Twillingate, to Canon Seymour, 14 November 1868, printed in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 236; [Feild], “Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1861,” 29. For the mercantile changeover from England to St John’s, see Ryan, Fish out of Water, 62–4. spg, a234, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, 31 December 1865; Woods, Newfoundland Almanac … 1865, 23; John G. Lucas, sub-collector at Fogo, 28 January 1863, letter to editor, Courier (St John’s), 22 April 1863. Lucas’s obituary stated, “Perhaps but few men, if any, have been more prominently identified with the Methodism of Newfoundland” (Methodist Monthly Greeting, March 1906, 3). Woods, Newfoundland Almanac … 1866, 20; wmms, reel 29, 1849–1852, John S. Addy, St John’s, “Missionary Meetings in Conception and Trinity Circuits,” 15 December 1851; ncs, Report … 1850, 3. gn 2/2 1858, box 47, Bishop Feild to Governor Alexander Bannerman, 28 May 1858; editorial, Courier (St John’s), 17 April 1861. Feild and Haddon had some history together – see chapter 6. For the fracturing of Church of England hegemony with responsible government in 1855, which Feild opposed, see Greene, “Influence of Religion in the Politics of Newfoundland”; Greene, Between Damnation and Starvation, 228, 234–68; Jones, “Bishops in Politics”; Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion”; O’Flaherty, Lost Country, 31–70, 85–94. Johnson spoke of Fogo as a “metropolis” with “outharbours” (spg, a230, Reginald M. Johnson, Fogo, January 1864). spg, a192, John Chapman, Twillingate, to Anthony Hamilton, secretary, 28 October 1826, 6 December 1829, 7 December 1835; a195, James C. Harvey, Fogo, to Bishop Spencer, 24 May 1842.

342

Notes to pages 144–6

155 wmms, reel 26, 1841–1842, John S. Addy, Trinity, 9 November 1841; Smith, History of the Methodist Church, 2:368. 156 Henry J. Indoe, “A Chapter in the History of Newfoundland Methodism,” 6 October 1896, Methodist Monthly Greeting, November 1896, 170; obituary of Henry Penny, Methodist Monthly Greeting, April 1899, 62; obituary of Mary Ann Taylor, Change Islands, Methodist Monthly Greeting, July 1905, 15; obituary of William Taylor, Change Islands, Methodist Monthly Greeting, September 1906, 3; wmms, reel 35, 1823–1855, Minutes of Newfoundland District Annual Meetings, “Reports of the Work of God in the Newfoundland District,” William Marshall, Green Bay, 1843. 157 spg, a222, Martin Blackmore, Bay Roberts, 30 September 1854. For example, wmms, reel 18, 1822–1823, John Walsh, St John’s, 11 December 1822; reel 21, 1828–1831, William Wilson, Burin, 5 November 1828; reel 26, 1841–1842, John S. Peach, Old Perlican, 9 March 1842; reel 27, 1842–1845, William Marshall, Twillingate, 26 October 1842. 158 spg, a222, William A. Elder, Fogo, Christmas 1854. As an example of moving “up the bay” to winter quarters from Change Islands, “a planter named Porter” wintered in Dog Bay, where he and others were “occupied, some in cutting lumber for their own use, others for merchants, and others in building craft of various sizes in places where they have at hand material suited to their wants” (“Extracts from the Diary of the Rev. F.R. Murray, Rural Dean of Notre Dame Bay,” Mission Field 20 [November 1875]: 338–9). 159 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk” Church Ship … 1849, 111. 160 Ibid., 109–11. 161 spg, a197, William A. Elder, Fogo, Journal Extracts, 1 October 1855; wy 103, box 1, “Newfoundland District Spiritual State Reports 1840–1857,” Thomas Fox, 1855 Green Bay Circuit Report. The number of Methodists, which had previously been static, doubled to 173 between 1857 and 1869 while the number of Anglicans declined slightly to 354 (Census of Newfoundland, 1845, 1857, 1869. Feild could not hold them with solemnity. 162 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 82–83. 163 [Kelly], Voyage of the Churchship “Star,” 1870, 38. Census of Newfoundland, 1845, 1857, 1869. 164 Henry J. Indoe, 6 October 1896, “A Chapter in the History of Newfoundland Methodism,” Methodist Monthly Greeting, November 1896, 170. In the early 1800s the Methodist Magazine carried a regular feature of extraordinary instances of “the providence of God asserted.” See, for example, the index to Methodist Magazine, 1816. 165 spg, a195, James C. Harvey, Fogo, to Bishop Spencer, 24 May 1842.

Notes to pages 146–53

343

166 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk” Church Ship … 1849, 108–9; Beamish, Hillier, and Johnstone, Mansions and Merchants, 175–80; Witcher, Historic Barr’d Islands, 7–8, 106–10. 167 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 75–7. 168 Feild returned for confirmation in the summers of 1857 and 1861. Telegraph (St John’s), 4 November 1857, [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 15 September 1857. [Feild], “The Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1861,” 30.

chapter five 1 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 35– 6. For the Jersey merchants in Forteau Bay, see Thornton, “Demographic and Mercantile Bases of Initial Permanent Settlement in the Straight of Belle Isle,” 162. 2 [Feild], A Visit to Labrador, 1848, 15; spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 24 October, 9 December 1848. The 1848 journal was also published in the spg, Report … 1848 and Report … 1849. 3 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 19 June 1845. 4 Ibid., 9 December 1848. 5 Bond, Skipper George Netman, 115–26. 6 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1825, 58–62, 136–8, 206–7; 1827, 132. 7 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 32– 4, 47, 69. 8 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 24 May 1845. 9 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, La Poile Bay, to Ernest Hawkins, 8 September 1848; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 23 November, 9 December 1848; spg Committee meeting, 17 November 1848, quoted in Buckle, Anglican Church in Labrador, 9; [Feild], Visit to Labrador, 1848, 3–7, Bishop Blomfield, Fulham, to Ernest Hawkins, 2 December 1848. 10 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, La Poile Bay, to Ernest Hawkins, 8 September 1848; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 21 May, 17 October 1849. 11 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 20 December 1849, 3 January, 15 February, 1 March, 25 April, 6 May 1850. 12 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, Hawk, Trinity Harbour, to Ernest Hawkins, 14 July 1846. 13 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 15 February 1850 (emphasis in original). 14 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 11 June 1849, 8 April 1850.

344

Notes to pages 154–9

15 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 1 March, 6 May, 3 July, 30 September 1850. For a radically different view of Thomas Boland, see his memorial as having “very high recommendations” and as “a person of much learning, ability, and zeal” after he froze to death while serving at his post (Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal [London] 110 [August 1856]: 56). 16 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, Forteau, to Ernest Hawkins, 2 August 1848; Bishop Feild, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 15 February 1849; Disney and Gifford, Labrador Mission, 16–17, Algernon Gifford, L’Anse Amour, Forteau Bay, to Bishop Feild, 13 June 1850. 17 “Mission of Forteau, Labrador,” Mission Field 1 (October 1856): 220–1; Buckle, Anglican Church in Labrador, 51–2. 18 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 8; [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 9 August 1857. 19 T.F. Henderson, rev. Alison G. Muir, “William Scott,” dnb, 17:1050–1; Scott, “Wooden Churches,” 14–16, 19–20. 20 Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 133; for a photo of St Peter’s, see 132. For Grey’s own drawing of the church, see his “Forteau Church, Labrador,” Sketches of Newfoundland and Labrador, plate 12. 21 Algernon Gifford, “A Mission in Labrador,” 25 February 1858, Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 146 (August 1859): 312–13. 22 spg, Labrador Mission, 9, Algernon Gifford, L’Anse Amour, Forteau Bay, to Bishop Feild, 13 June 1850. 23 “The Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1861,” Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 175 (January 1862): 26–7; “Unexpected Meeting,” Mission Field 6 (October 1861): 217–20; cfms, Sixth Annual Report, 1863, 11. 24 spg, a217, Bishop Feild, St Georges, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 26 December 1859; a249, John Freer, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 10 June 1861. 25 Buckle, Anglican Church in Labrador, 46. 26 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 67–8, 71; spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 18 April 1850. The Methodist missionary James Norris, at Carbonear, reported in 1850 that “several of our members, and one Class leader, remained at the Labrador during the Winter” (uc Archives, wy 103, box 1, “Newfoundland District Spiritual State Reports, 1840–57,” James Norris, 1850, Carbonear). 27 Storer, “Journals, Labrador, 1849,” 28 July–17 August 1849. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 184–9; Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford

Notes to pages 159–63

31 32 33

34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43

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Movement, 119; Williams, On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge, 61. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 24– 6. J.B. Freer, Battle Harbour, 5 July 1853, Occasional Papers from St Augustine’s College, 1 November 1853. spg, a227, Edward Botwood, Forteau, 6 September 1860; [Feild], “Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1861,” 26; “Labrador Journal of John G. Currie,” Provincial Wesleyan, 27 November 1873. [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 17 August 1857 Charles Comben, “Visit to Labrador,” Provincial Wesleyan, 18 January 1860. Census for Newfoundland and Labrador, 1869, 1874. “Labrador Mission Work by J.P.B. [John P. Bowell], Red Bay,” Wesleyan, 29 August 1879; Census for Newfoundland and Labrador, 1884. In 1884 at Red Bay there were 10 Anglicans and 121 Methodists. A similar revival occurred in winter quarters in Notre Dame Bay (wmms, reel 35, 1823–1855, 1847 Report of the Work of God in the Newfoundland District, John S. Peach, Green Bay). For Methodist egalitarianism, see Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, 14, 18, 138. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 73. [Feild], Visit to Labrador, 1848, 22, 29–30. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 44– 50. Feild did not mention it in his published diary, but in a letter to Hawkins he said that his clergymen married a few Roman Catholic women at Forteau and baptized the children into Anglicanism (spg, a249, Bishop Feild, La Poile Bay, to Ernest Hawkins, 8 September 1848). [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 45– 50. [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 73–7. spg, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 1 March, 25 April, 4 June 1850; spg, Labrador Mission, 7, H.P. Disney, Harbour Grace, to Ernest Hawkins, 2 November 1850; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 31–2, 34; Bishop Feild, Twillingate, to spg, 3 August 1853, Church of England Magazine 35 (July–December 1853): 29; “Memoir of the Rev. H.P. Disney, Sometime Missionary to the Labrador,” Colonial Church Chronicle 99 (September 1855): 88. Coadjutor Bishop Kelly called the church “a rude, but well-proportioned and thoroughly church-like building,” and “humble and unpretending” (Kelly, “Perils in the Deep, 1869,” 263; [Kelly], “Notes of a Voyage in the Church Ship Star in the Summer of 1870,” Times (St John’s), 26 October 1870.

346

Notes to pages 164–6

44 Buckle, Anglican Church in Labrador, 20–1, 106; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 30–1. Disney was “much weakened” in the summer of 1853 and died of fever the following July (“Memoir of the Rev. H.P. Disney, Sometime Missionary to the Labrador,” Colonial Church Chronicle 99 (September 1855): 86–7). 45 “H.P. Disney, the Glebe, Balliver, Athboy,” 11 November 1851, Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 59 (May 1852): 427. 46 Record, 25 April, 19 August, 2 September, 18 November, 30 December 1850; Times (St John’s), 21 December 1850, 8 January, 21 May 1851; Public Ledger (St John’s), 24 December 1850, 26 August 1851; Weekly Herald and Conception-Bay General Advertiser (Harbour Grace), 1 January, 28 May 1851. Transatlantic news was up-to-date on the Labrador coast. Feild first read about “the rupture between Russia and Turkey” leading to the Crimean War in a newspaper that arrived at Francis Harbour direct from Liverpool in June 1853 ([Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 31). 47 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 31 July 1850; [Feild], Address on the System of the Church Society, 15–16; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Thomas E. Collett, 26 February 1850; [Feild], Circular Letter from the Bishop of Newfoundland to His Clergy … 1845, 31–3. 48 spg, a249, T.F.H. Bridge, St John’s, to Hawkins, 8 October 1846; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 29 January 1847, 30 May 1849; spg, Report … 1849, lxiv. 49 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, Twillingate, to Ernest Hawkins, 3 August 1853; Rollmann, “Wordworth’s Nephew”; Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G., 857–8. 50 [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 4 July 1857. For photos of St James Church, Battle Harbour, and a discussion of its relative adherence to ecclesiologist principles of Gothic architecture, see Coffman, Gothic Newfoundland, front cover, 132–5. For Grey’s own drawing of the church, see his “Battle Harbour Parsonage and Church, Labrador,” Sketches of Newfoundland and Labrador, plate 16. 51 Noble, After Icebergs with a Painter, 74; Rule, Reminiscences of My Life, 10–11, 13–14. For Wordworth’s desire to see Tractarianism planted in the New World, see Blair, “Transatlantic Tractarians,” 291–2. 52 Wesleyan Missionary Notices, 25 November 1862, Labrador journal of John Goodison, Carbonear, to wmms, 13 September 1862 – Battle Harbour, 3 August 1862, Merchantman Harbour, 13 July 1862; Wesleyan Missionary Notices, 26 December 1861, Account of Labrador Mission, Thomas Fox, Catalina, to wmms, 26 November 1861 – Merchantman Harbour. 53 cfms, Sixth Annual Report, 1863, 11.

Notes to pages 166–72

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54 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 46. 55 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 72–3, 82–9. Hitting Methodists with the apostolic succession seems to have been a common tactic of High Church bishops. Bishop Mountain did the same to Methodists on the Gaspé twenty-five years earlier (Headon, “Influence of the Oxford Movement,” 13). 56 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1853, 52; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1860, 272; wmms, reel 32, 1858–1864, Charles Combden to Henry Daniel, Chairman of Newfoundland District, “Mission Visit to Labrador” 1859. 57 [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1859,” 29 July 1859. 58 spg, a226, Reginald M. Johnston, Fogo, 7 February 1860, “First Report Reaching to 21 December 1859”; a218, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 13 September 1860. 59 Mission Field 5 (December 1860): 265–7, 269. 60 Carr, Frederic Edwin Church: The Icebergs, 35, 53. 61 Noble, After Icebergs with a Painter, 190, 197–9. 62 Extract of a letter from John Brewster, Twillingate, Green Bay, 4 September 1850, Missions in British America, Newfoundland, Wesleyan Notices Newspaper, 27 February 1851. 63 William Shears, Bay Roberts, to Coadjutor Bishop James B. Kelly, 6 May 1872, Mission Life 5 (1874): 538–9; Bond, “Castaway of Fish Rock,” 502–4; Ryan, Ice Hunters, 154. 64 spg, a232, George Hutchinson, Battle Harbour, 30 January 1864. 65 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 66–73. 66 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 15 February 1849; Bishop Feild, st John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 21 May 1849, 15 February, 25 April 1850, 26 January 1856. 67 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 4 August 1858. 68 Buckle, Anglican Church in Labrador, 63–4; spg, 1859 resolution; [Kelly], “Notes of a Voyage in the Church Ship Star,” 5 August 1870. 69 [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 19–23 July 1857. 70 Ibid., 12 July 1857; Chimmo, “Visit to the Fishing Grounds of Labrador”; Buckle, Anglican Church in Labrador, xxviii, nss Committee minute, 8 April 1865. 71 Colley, “Two Years in the Mission of Sandwich Bay, Labrador,” 91–92, 94. 72 Provincial Wesleyan, 26 October 1859; wmms, reel 28, 1846–1948, John S. Addy, Brigus, 21 November 1846. 73 John Snowball, “Revival of Religion at Carbonear,” Wesleyan, 22 September

348

74 75

76 77

78 79

80

81 82 83 84

Notes to pages 172–5

1849; uc Archives, wy 103, box 1, “Newfoundland District Spiritual State Reports, 1840–57,” John S. Peach, 1850, John Brewster, 1853, Paul Prestwood, 1857, Green Bay Circuit Report; wmms reel 35, 1823–1855, Minutes of Newfoundland District Annual Meetings, 1854, 1855; reel 31, 1854–1867, Thomas Smith, Port de Grave, 24 April 1854; Thomas Smith, Bonavista, to the committee, 25 January 1855; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1855, 653–6; Thomas Harris, “Reminiscences, No. 3,” Methodist Monthly Greeting, October 1890, 150; Joseph Todhunter, Greenspond, Provincial Wesleyan, 21 May 1865. spg, a232, George Seymour Chamberlain, Moreton’s Harbour, 14 April 1864. wmms, reel 32, 1858–1864, Henry Daniel, St John’s, to secretaries of the Wesleyan Missionary Society, 3 January 1860. For Comben’s 1859 Labrador report, see Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1860, 271–3. “Voyage of the Coadjutor Bishop of Newfoundland,” 1870, Mission Field 16 (February 1871): 38. Colley, “Two Years in the Mission of Sandwich Bay, Labrador,” 94, 99. The Salvation Army arrived in Portugal Cove in 1885. It was old Methodism, now in uniform. It spread quickly to the bays of the northeast coast of Newfoundland from which the Labrador fishermen came. The Salvationists revived the Methodist fervour that was “beginning to wane” (Moyles, Salvation Army in Newfoundland, 5, 13–15, 42–3). Butler, Labrador Mission, 7–8; Missionary Magazine 42 (June 1862): 182; Among the Deep-Sea Fishers 24 (October 1926): 121. cfms, First Annual Report, 1858, 4, 10–11; Proceedings of the First Twenty Years of the Religious Tract Society, cover, 14; Missionary Magazine 42 (June 1862): 183. Small, “Diary of Burgeo, Newfoundland,” 2, 3, 34; Chubbs-Ransom, “Where We Came From and Who We Are.” One American, William Whiteley, was converted at Salmon Bay and settled at Bonne Esperance (Among the Deep Sea Fishers 24 (October 1926): 122; Whiteley, Northern Seas, Hardy Sailors, 10–14, 261–9. cfms, First Annual Report, 1858, 8, 10; Fourth Annual Report, 1861, 11–12; Fifth Annual Report, 1862, 18; Report of the Labrador Mission for 1865, 7. Bishop Mountain, Quebec, to spg, 12 April 1860, Mission Field 5 (June 1860): 121–2. Cookesley, Memorial Sketch of Frederick John Cookesley, 62; [Bicentennial History Committee]. Dissenting Church of Christ at St John’s, 14. cfms, First Annual Report, 1858, 9; Cookesley, Memorial Sketch of Frederick John Cookesley, 54.

Notes to pages 176–80

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85 Butler, Labrador Mission, 11. As did Margaret Macfarlane after her (Report of the Labrador Mission, for 1865, 29). 86 Missionary Magazine 42 (June 1862): 185. cfms, Fourth Annual Report, 1861, 27; Seamen’s Friend (April 1862): 245–6; cfms, Fifth Annual Report, 1862, 13– 14, Jane Brodie, Esquimaux River, Labrador, to secretary, 17 May 1862. 87 Congregationalist (January 1876): 6, (February 1876): 118. 88 cfms, Sixth Annual Report, 1863, 11; Report of the Labrador Mission, for 1865, 8, 19; Report of the Labrador Mission, for 1867, 36. 89 Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 223; Chandler, Introduction to the Oxford Movement, 97–9; Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 93–4.

chapter six 1 rpa, mg 598, spg, a225, Annual Report to spg of W.F. Meek, Harbour Buffett, 4 January 1859. See also [Wix], Six Months of a Newfoundland Missionary’s Journal, 25–62. 2 [nss], Proceedings … 1848–1849, 14; spg, a216, William White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853; spg, a168, Thomas Collett to Archdeacon Edward Wix, 13 May 1836. Harbour Buffett is spelled variously in quotations: Harbor Buffet, Harbour Beaufette, Harbour Beaufet, Harbour Bouffet. 3 [nss], Proceedings … 1848–1849, 14. 4 Journal of the Legislative Council of Newfoundland, appendix, 1837, “Education Returns.” 5 [nss], Proceedings … 1848–1849, 14. 6 Butler, Little Nord Easter, 81–3. 7 Journal of the House of Assembly, 1840, appendix, “Education.” Collett told the Education Board at Placentia they were “in possession of some funds they had contracted” to build the school, which they hoped to have finished by May 1837 (Journal of Legislative Council, appendix, 1837, “Education Returns”). 8 spg, a194, William Jeynes to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 12 October 1840; William Jeynes to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 21 December 1840; [nss], Proceedings … 1848–1849, 14. 9 spg, a216, White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853. He said that James Butler & Co. of Harbour Buffett also contributed. Alexander Chambers did business in Harbour Buffett, but lived at Burgeo (Chamber’s Island) nearby. 10 Royal Gazette (St John’s), 8 March 1842; Jones, “Early Opposition to Bishop

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11

12

13

14 15

16

17

18 19 20

21

22

23

Notes to pages 180–3

Field [sic],” 37. In a letter to H.P. Disney, Collett stated, “I am generally known to many respectable people in St John’s” (Times [St John’s], 21 May 1851). spg, a194, William Jeynes to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 12 October 1840; Bishop Aubrey Spencer’s “Visit to Placentia Bay,” 14–16 July 1843; a195, “Harbour Beaufet Memorial from the Inhabitants to the Bishop fo the Diocese,” 1843. uc Archives, wy 200, Burin, box 1, Circuit Book, Board of Trustees, 1836–7. There are no records for 1843, the year of Bishop Spencer’s visit, because the Methodist clergyman at Burin, James England, “was not able to visit the Bay.” spg, a194, William Jeynes to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 12 October 1840; spg, a195, “Harbour Beaufet Memorial from the Inhabitants to the Bishop of the Diocese,” 1843. Quoted in Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 188; spg, a194, Bishop Aubrey Spencer to A.M. Campbell, 12 June 1841. Lives of Missionaries: North America, 213; spg, a194, William Jeynes to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 12 October 1840; Bishop Aubrey Spencer’s “Visit to Placentia Bay,” 16 July 1843; a195, George Baring Cowan to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 16 May 1842. [nss], Proceedings … 1842–1843, 1843, 18; Proceedings … 1848–1849, 15; spg, a194, Bishop Spencer’s “Visit to Placentia Bay,” 10 July 1843. Similarly, the 1844 Protestant Board inspector’s report of the school at Rock Harbour was quite positive (Journal of the House of Assembly, 1845, appendix, “Education,” 163–4). For example, Frederick Meek (spg, a196, Meek, Annual Report to spg, 23 November 18550); spg, a216, White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853. [nss], Proceedings … 1848–1849, 16–17. Ibid. rpa, gn 2/2, box 27, William Haddon to Sir John Harvey, 24 May 1842, 33–4; Crosbie, “Births, Marriages, Deaths in Newfoundland Newspapers,” 44; Morning Chronicle, 1 August 1876. Patriot (St John’s), 31 December 1853; nss, Thomas Dunn, superintendent, to committee, February 1852, c&ccs, General Committee Minute Book, 1850–1855, 227; wy 200, Burin, box 1, Circuit Book, Board of Trustees, 1836–1847; see years 1839–40, 1843–4, 1846. Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, John Haddon to Thomas Collett, 7 April 1854; advertisement, Courier (St John’s), 3 November 1855; gn 1/3/B, Governor Bannerman to Bishop Edward Feild, 17 May 1858. rpa, gn2/2, 1858, box 47, 1858, Bishop Edward Feild to Governor Bannerman, 28 May 1858; editorial, Courier (St John’s), 17 April 1861.

Notes to pages 183–5

351

24 Public Ledger (St John’s), 26 August 1851. 25 Collett, Church of England, No. 2, preface, 11; [nss], Proceedings … 1848–1849, 14–15; spg, a194, William Jeynes to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 12 October 1840. See also Journal of Legislative Council, 1837, appendix, “Education Returns.” 26 spg, a190, Petty Harbour petition, 31 May 1824; [nss], Proceedings … 1833– 1834, 33; Courier (St John’s), 22, 29 April 1854; Poole and Cuff, “James A. Simms,” Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, 5:193; Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild in Newfoundland,” appendix, John Collett, Vincent Square, Westminster, to his son, Thomas, 15 April 1845. Information from Collett family records, unless otherwise noted. 27 Royal Gazette (St John’s), 2 October 1849; rpa, gn 2/1/9/3, box 1, 1843–1849, 34–5, James Crowdy to James Butler and Thomas Collett, 29 July 1843; gn 2/1/A, vol. 46, 1846–1850, 453, James Crowdy to commissioners of relief, Harbour Buffett, 30 December 1847; Courier (St John’s), 27 June 1845; Journal of the House of Assembly, 1855, appendix, 249. 28 Haystack Reflections, 2, 84; “Journal of John Lewis,” 1.08, 26 March 1819. 29 wy 100, box 1, 1829–1873, “Minutes of Newfoundland District, Wesleyan Methodist Church, England, 1829–1850”; and wy 200, Burin, box 1 Account Book, 1828, “Haystack on Long Island” Class. 30 uc Archives, wy 500, “A Journal Kept by James England Wesleyan Missionary Newfoundland,” 14–15 October 1841; wy 200, Burin, box 1, Circuit Book, Board of Trustees 1836–1847, the lists are not alphabetized. 31 spg, a194, Bishop Aubrey Spencer to A.M. Campbell, 3, 25 March 1841; gn 2/2, box 24, January–March 1841, William Jeynes to James Crowdy, colonial secretary, 5 January, 16 March 1841. See also [nss], Proceedings … 1824–1825, 63. 32 [nss], Proceedings … 1840–1841, 10, 1; Proceedings … 1848–1849, 16. 33 [nss], Proceedings … 1824–1825, 63; Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 1, 48, 235. 34 [nss], Proceedings … 1848–1849, 15; [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 5. See also spg, a216, “Address Read in the Schoolroom in Harbor Buffett, August 10th 1851,” 1–2. Tucker said he was an “invalid clergyman” (Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 53), and Feild, “a sick Clergyman” ([Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 125); a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 25 September, 8 November 1845. 35 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, Bermuda, to Ernest Hawkins, 18 April 1846; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 25 May, 7 August 1846. 36 Tennyson, “Ulysses,” l. 52.

352

Notes to pages 185–7

37 spg, a197, William White to spg, 3 September 1846; William White to G.H. Fagan, 18 September 1846; George Hills to G.H. Fagan, 3 February 1847. 38 Pollen, Narrative of Five Years at St Saviour’s, Leeds, 13, 36–7; Yates, Buildings, Faith and Worship, 139. 39 Times (St John’s), 25 September 1847. White arrived in Newfoundland on the Hawk on 25 May 1847; Street, Journal of Oliver Rouse, 87, 91, 250. 40 spg, a197, William White to Bishop Edward Feild, 1848? 41 ncs, Report, 1847, 12; Report, 1848, 10–11. 42 [Feild], Address on the System of the Church Society in Newfoundland, 5, 15. 43 Times (St John’s), Bonavista, 7 April 1847; Merasheen, 15 September 1847; Conception Bay, 13, 23 October 1847. Public Ledger (St John’s), Burin, 27 August 1847; Fogo and Twillingate, 14 September 1847; Harbour Grace, 24 September 1847. Patriot (St John’s), Oderin, 20 October 1847. 44 spg, a197, William White, Harbour Buffett, Report to spg, Christmas 1853; gn 2/2, box 35, 1849, box 34, 746–8, Philip Tocque to James Crowdy, 20 September 1848; gn 2/1/A, vol. 46, 245, James Crowdy to John Haddon, 14 May 1847; vol. 46, 347, James Crowdy to Walsh, Chambers and LeMessurier, 28 September 1847; vol. 46, 375–6, James Crowdy to William White, James Butler, and John Haddon, 16 October 1847; vol. 46, 453, James Crowdy to commissioners of relief, Harbour Buffett, 30 December 1847; vol. 47, 190–1, James Crowdy to commissioners of the poor, Harbour Buffett, 16 January 1849; vol. 47, 17, James Crowdy to commissioners of relief, Harbour Buffett, 21 January 1848; vol. 47, 158, James Crowdy to William White, James Butler, John Haddon, and Hands [sic], 29 November 1848. Similarly another 100 barrels of meal were sent to LeMessurier at Isle Valen, 14 March 1848, 51. 45 Times (St John’s), 17 February 1847; Public Ledger (St John’s), 19 February 1847. 46 Patriot (St John’s), 13 February, 13 October 1847; Public Ledger (St John’s), 17 April 1849. 47 [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 5; Public Ledger (St John’s), 26 February 1850. Bishop Feild’s letter to nss was dated 7 November 1848 (Record, 14 June 1849). 48 [nss], Proceedings … 1840–1841, 2. 49 Journal of the House of Assembly, 4, 5, 7, 11, 12 February 1850; 5, 6, 17 February, 13 March, 5 May 1851. Ambrose Shea presented such a petition from William Kepple White and Thomas G. [sic] Collett on 5 February. Maybe Collett thought that since the nss school in Harbour Buffett was made up completely of Church of England members, the nss school would receive a grant under the new arrangement. Only a couple of Church of England congregations or portions of congregations protested

Notes to pages 188–90

50

51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

60

61

62 63 64 65

353

the request, notably Port de Grave, 14 February 1850, and Harbour Grace, 10 February 1851. Public Ledger (St John’s), 23 May 1851. Feild did finally obtain his goal twenty-five years later in 1875, a year before he died (Jones, “Religion, Education and Politics in Newfoundland, 1836–1875,” 64–76). spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 19 June 1845; a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 27 May 1851. [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 5–6; Collett, Church of England in Newfoundland, 3. For “churching,” see Book of Common Prayer, 278–80: “The thanksgiving of women after child-birth, commonly called the churching of women.” [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 6–7, William White to Richard Collett and Samuel Masters, Harbour Buffett, 12 October 1849. Collett’s son may have been too poor to pay the required fee to the Church Society, but Collett himself made no such plea. He was too Protestant to pay the Church Society. The Society’s 1850 Annual Report showed he paid £2.7s. in 1848 and £1 in 1849 to the Church Society (ncs, Report, 1850, xxxii). [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 7–8, Thomas Collett to William White, Harbour Buffett, 14 October 1849. Collett, Church of England, 3. Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 2. [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 9; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 4; spg, a194 William Jeynes to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 12 October 1840. Masters in his affidavit stated in 1851, “I, Samuel Masters … a member of the Church of England.” Collett too, says, “We are, as we ever were, members of the Church of England.” Collett, Church of England, 13, 15. [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 9. Spencer was not the only spg evangelical bishop in the colonies. See Owen Vidal, first bishop of Sierra Leone, in Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G., 765. For his evangelical preaching, see [Vidal, Owen E.], Bishop of Sierra Leone, Parish Sermons. Newfoundlanders were aware of him and others; see “Report of Committee of Colonial Church and School Society” ([nss], Public Ledger [St John’s], 5 June 1855). spg, a195, “Harbour Beaufet Memorial from the Inhabitants to the Bishop of the Diocese,” 1843. Times (St John’s), 1 March 1851. [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 9; spg, a216, White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853. Book of Common Prayer, 218.

354

Notes to pages 190–4

66 spg, a194, William Jeynes to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 12 October 1840; [spg], Report for the Year 1831, 101. 67 “Memoir of Jacob George Mountain,” Lives of Missionaries: North America, 222. Mountain held a like view of lay marriage. In 1850 he refused to church a mother or baptize her child because the mother and father would not agree to be remarried by him. They had been married by Thomas E. Gaden, a justice of the peace. Gaden said that the refusal to provide these services of the church was “looked upon as a great grievance by many parties in the District.” gn 2/2 1853, box 41, July to December, Gaden to James Crowdy, colonial secretary, 25 October 1853. 68 Collett, Church of England, 10. 69 Courier (St John’s), 12 April 1854. See also Public Ledger (St John’s), 30 December 1853. 70 Collett, Church of England, 3–5. 71 Ibid., 6; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 4; [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 10. 72 Collett, Church of England, 13; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 4; [White], Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 11. 73 Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 4, 36. Parish Records, Church of England, St John’s, 1830–1870, box 1, St Thomas’s Parish, Baptisms, 1844–1858. Thomas Edward Collett, baptized 5 June 1850, born 7 October 1849. 74 Collett, Church of England, 8; spg, a216, White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853; [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, appendix 1, James Harvey, Port de Grave, to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 20 October 1853; appendix 2, W.J. Hoyles to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, Carbonear, 19 October 1853; appendix 5; Woods, Newfoundland Almanac, 1853, 41. 75 Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 5, 24. 76 Butler, Little Nord Easter, 47. 77 Record, 19 August 1850. 78 Wilson, Our Protestant Faith in Danger, 39, quoted in Christian Remembrancer 20 (July–December 1850): 498. Pereiro states, “Islington became a centre of extreme Evangelical opposition to Tractarianism” and that “Islington Evangelicalism” and Daniel Wilson, its leader, “pronounced a unanimous and uncompromising denunciation of the Oxford Tracts” (Pereiro, “Ethos” and the Oxford Movement, 16, 69). 79 Christian Remembrancer 20 (July–December 1850): 505–8. 80 Times (St John’s), 25 September 1850. 81 Record, 18 November 1850. 82 Collett, Church of England, 7; [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 14–15, appendix 5.

Notes to pages 195–9

355

83 spg, a216, Feild, “Address Read in the Schoolroom in Harbor Buffet, August 10th 1851,” 13; Collett, Church of England, 9; [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 3, 14. The testimony of White’s other witness, Frances Burton, is thus weak: “He never asked hir to confess hir sins or denied giving hir the Saccrement if she filt a desire to receive it” (4). 84 Times (St John’s), 19 October 1850. 85 Times (St John’s), 21 December 1850. William Charles St John gave Disney’s letter a wider readership by printing it in his Weekly Herald and ConceptionBay General Advertiser (Harbour Grace), 1 January 1851. 86 Times (St John’s), 21 May 1851. The Collett letter was reprinted on 28 May by the Weekly Herald (Harbour Grace), the main community of Disney’s Mission. 87 Collett, Church of England, 7–11, Bishop Edward Feild to Governor J.G. Le Marchant, 31 May 1851; spg, a216, William White to the Newfoundland Church Society, Harbour Buffett, 4 October 1853 (italics in pamphlet). 88 spg, a216, Feild, “Address Read in the Schoolroom in Harbor Buffet, August 10th 1851,” 8, 10, 12. 89 [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 11, 14–15; Collett, Church of England, 8. 90 White said in 1854 that they were away from home for six months. See spg, a222, Quarterly Report, Harbor Buffet, 30 June 1854. 91 Times (St John’s), 30 August 1851. 92 [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 7, 8, 10; Collett, Church of England, 5, 7, 11; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 4; spg, a216, Feild, “Address Read in the Schoolroom in Harbor Buffet, August 10th 1851,” 9. 93 spg, a216, Feild, “Address Read in the Schoolroom in Harbor Buffet, August 10th 1851,” 1, 3–5, 8. 94 Which Feild answered on 10 September 1850; see spg, a215, Bishop Edward Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 10 September 1850. For a copy of Hawkins’s letter to Feild in his letter of 22 August 1850, see Ernest Hawkins to Duke of Newcastle, 22 April 1854, copied in the Royal Gazette (St John’s), 6 June 1854; Courier (St John’s), 10 June 1854. 95 spg, a216, Feild, “Address Read in the Schoolroom in Harbor Buffet, August 10th 1851,” 16; [Feild], “Visitation of the Lord Bishop, 1851,” 5 August 1851. 96 Public Ledger (St John’s), 26 August 1851. “Omega” may have been John Haddon back in Harbour Buffett from Bonavista for the summer. It was not Collett; see Church of England, 14. Another writer, “Paul Pry” from Placentia Bay, said that he noticed a decrease in subscriptions to the Church Society, “particularly in Beaufet.” What could make them fewer still? His answer: “Merely to

356

97 98 99 100

101

102 103 104 105 106 107 108

109 110

111

112 113

Notes to pages 199–202

apply the Puseyite Lucifer match to the candles in the church of that harbour” (Newfoundland Express [St John’s], 10 May 1853). Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 7. Public Ledger (St John’s), 26 August 1851. [Feild], “Visitation of the Lord Bishop, 1851,” 10 August 1851. Collett, Church of England, 14, 15; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 37; [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 16–17; spg, a216, White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853. Collett, Church of England, 15; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 8, 26; [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, appendix 5. They delivered the results of their investigation on 8 November 1853. For example, 1844, 1845. Quoted in Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 15, 26. [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 16. Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 147–8. Glassie, Material Culture, 21; Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society,” 164. Afterwards the board met in Harbour Buffett (Journal of the House of Assembly, 1851, 243). Journal of the House of Assembly, 1851, appendix, Education, “Statement of Accounts Presented at the Meeting of Protestant Board of Education for Placentia Bay,” 3 July 1850, 83. Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, Ann Maria Bendle to Emma Collett, 11 April 1850. Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, Thomas Collett, to Rev. Henry Deck, secretary to British North American School Society, [nss], 9 February 1857. Deck was secretary of the Church of England School Society [nss] in 1850, but in 1857 he was just a member of the committee of the Colonial Church and School Society ([nss], Proceedings … 1849–1850, iii; and Annual Report … 1856–1857, ii). Journal of the House of Assembly, 1855, appendix, Education, “Protestant Central Board Report 1852–1853,” Harbour Buffett, 92. Haddon said the school was started in 1851 (Journal of the House of Assembly, 1859, appendix, Education, 279). Journal of the House of Assembly, 1848/49, appendix, Education Reports, 404; 1851, appendix, Education, 83. gn 2/2, box 45, 1856, July to September, 391–3, Thomas Collett to John Kent, 22 September 1856.

Notes to pages 202–9

357

114 Journal of the House of Assembly, 1859, appendix, Education, 279. 115 gn 2/19/3, box 1, 1843–1849, James Crowdy to James Butler and Thomas Collett, 29 July 1843, 34. 116 Journal of the House of Assembly, 1843, 156; ibid., 1844, 17; ibid., 1845, 17; ibid., 1846, 45; gn 2/1/A, 190–1. 117 Journal of the House of Assembly, 1851, appendix, 132–133. 118 gn 2/1/A, vol. 48, 27 September 1852, 367; gn 2/2, box 41, 1853, 51–4, 56–7, 431–2; spg, a222, Annual Report to spg, 23 October 1854. 119 spg, a216, White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853. 120 Newfoundland Guardian and Christian Intelligencer 1, no.1 (January 1851): 1– 2; Greene, Between Damnation and Starvation, 236, 266. 121 Collett, Church of England, 2, 18, 25. 122 ncs, Report, 1853, 3; Bridge, Statement of Some Recent Proceedings, 4; Henry Winton had a copy by 6 December (Public Ledger [St John’s], 6 December 1853). 123 spg, a216, William White, Harbour Buffett, to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853; William White, Harbour Buffett, to Bishop Edward Feild, 4 October 1853. 124 [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 4; Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, 141. 125 Record, 5, 15 September 1853. 126 spg, a216, White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853; Courier (St John’s), 22 April 1854. 127 Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 5. 128 spg, a216, William White to the Newfoundland Church Society, 4 October 1853. Three months later he reported to the spg that Collett was “a violent unchristian individual of a reputation which renders him beneath contempt” (spg, a197, White, Harbour Buffett, Report to spg, Christmas 1853). The spg published a large portion of White’s report, but omitted this section (spg, Report … 1854, lviii–lx). 129 [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 3–4, 11, 13, 15–16, 18. 130 ncs, Report, 1856, 11–12. The 1857 report said Bridge had been “the mainspring of the Society” (ncs, Report, 1857, 11). 131 Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 6; [White], Published under the Direction of the Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, 6; ibid., appendix 4, 6–7; Bridge, Statement of Some Recent Proceedings, 4; spg, a216, Resolution of Newfoundland Church Society, October 1853; Bishop Edward Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 11 October 1853. 132 The correct title was The Church of England in Newfoundland. 133 Public Ledger (St John’s), 6 December 1853.

358

Notes to pages 210–12

134 Public Ledger (St John’s), 30 December 1853. 135 Courier (St John’s), 10 December 1853. 136 The Morning Chronicle, 23 December 1853, quoted “Misrepresentations Affecting the Newfoundland Clergy.” 137 Patriot (St John’s), 28 January 1854. 138 Collett, Church of England, 5. See also, a216, Bishop Feild, “Address Read in the Schoolroom in Harbor Buffet, August 10th 1851,” 4. 139 “Misrepresentations Affecting the Newfoundland Clergy,” Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 79 (January 1854): 250–1. 140 Hamilton, Comments upon a Recent Resolution, 7; Bridge, Statement of Some Recent Proceedings, 3; ibid., appendix 1, Governor K.B. Hamilton to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 4 November 1853; ibid., appendix 2, Archdeacon Thomas Bridge to Governor K.B. Hamilton, 5 November 1853; ibid., appendix 3, Governor K.B. Hamilton to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 7 November 1853. The same correspondence forms the appendix of Hamilton’s Comments upon a Recent Resolution. 141 Times (St John’s), 11 June 1853; Royal Gazette (St John’s), 14 June 1853. That Hamilton also privately held these evangelical views was the strong personal impression of nss teacher and deacon Robert Dyer from his time with the governor (White, “Robert Dyer Diary, 1841–1859,” 14 June 1853). 142 Bridge, Statement of Some Recent Proceedings, 4–5; ibid., appendix 5, Archdeacon Thomas Bridge to Governor K.B. Hamilton, 8 November 1853; ibid., appendix 6, Governor K.B. Hamilton to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 8 November 1853. 143 Bridge, Statement of Some Recent Proceedings, 6; ibid., appendix 9, Governor K.B. Hamilton to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 9 November 1853. 144 Ibid., 7; ibid., appendix 10. See also Victoria R., “Royal Instructions to Sir John Gaspard Le Marchant, 19 July 1848,” section 48, “It is Our Will and Pleasure that in the administration of the Government of the said Island, you should be aiding and assisting to the said Bishop and to his Commissary or Commissaries, in execution of this charge” (Journal of the House of Assembly, 1848/49). 145 Bridge, Statement of Some Recent Proceedings, 7–8; ibid., appendix 10, Committee of the Newfoundland Church Society, to Governor K.B. Hamilton, 10 November 1853. 146 Bridge, Statement of Some Recent Proceedings, 7, 9–10; ibid., appendix 11, James Crowdy to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 11 November 1853; ibid., appendix 12, James Crowdy to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 12 November 1853; ibid., appendix 13–14, Committee of “The Newfoundland Church Society” to James Crowdy, 15 November 1853.

Notes to pages 213–16

359

147 [Feild], Address on the System of the Church Society, 3–5, 13–14. See appendix, 15–16, Bishop Edward Feild to Thomas Collett, 26 February 1850. Medley’s biographer, Barry Craig, contrasted Feild’s approach with that of the New Brunswick bishop: “While Feild shared Medley’s determination to end reliance on the spg grants … This financial emphasis led him into areas of controversy that Medley would certainly have avoided. For example, Feild refused the sacraments to those who were unwilling to pay into a church dues system that he had conceived” (Craig, Apostle to the Wilderness, 46). 148 [Feild], Address on the System of the Church Society, 5–7, 9. The Church Society adopted the system or “plan” at their 1845 Anniversary Meeting (Times [St John’s], 18 October 1845). 149 [Feild], Address on the System of the Church Society, 10. 150 “Address of the Governor” to the Newfoundland Church Society, Royal Gazette (St John’s), 14 June 1853. 151 [Feild], Address on the System of the Church Society, 16–21, Bishop Edward Feild to Governor K.B. Hamilton, 10 December 1853; Bishop Edward Feild to Governor K.B. Hamilton, 12 December 1853; Governor K.B. Hamilton to Bishop Edward Feild, 13 December 1853. 152 His last entry in the pamphlet is 4 February 1854. 153 [Feild], Address on the System, 17, Bishop Edward Feild to Governor K.B. Hamilton, 10 December 1853; Bridge, Statement of Some Recent Proceedings, 7; Hamilton, Comments upon a Recent Resolution, 3. 154 Hamilton, Comments upon a Recent Resolution, 3–5, Governor K.B. Hamilton to William Thomas, 4 February 1854; ibid., 8–9, 11–12, Governor K.B. Hamilton to William Thomas, 8 December 1853. 155 Frederick Jones, “Ker Baille Hamilton,” dcb, 11:44; Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 466. 156 Hamilton, Comments upon a Recent Resolution, 7; Bridge, Statement of Recent Proceedings, 3–4, appendix, 1–3. 157 Feild, Address on the System, 17. As for Hamilton’s role in delaying the vote on responsible government until May 1855, his argument that it was necessary to wait for spring so people on the northeast coast could vote is quite reasonable. Surely the editors of the Patriot and the Newfoundlander and other ardent advocates of democracy in St John’s would not have wanted to deprive Bonavista, Fogo, Twillingate, Exploits Island, and other centres of the opportunity to exercise their right to vote (Jones, “Ker Baille Hamilton”). 158 Courier (St John’s), 12, 22 April 1854, John Haddon, Bonavista, to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 3, 20 February 1854. Haddon suspected that these letters had been intercepted in the mail since they were still not published by

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167

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169

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Notes to pages 216–23

7 April (Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, 264–5, John Haddon to Thomas Collett, 7 April 1854). Courier (St John’s), 29 April 1854, John Haddon to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 27 February 1854. Courier (St John’s), 29 April 1854; Record, 23, 30 March 1854. Patriot (St John’s), 28 September 1850, 21 June 1852, 29 April 1854. Gunn, Political History of Newfoundland 1832–1864, 134. Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 2–3, 11, 22–31, 33. The Courier (St John’s) advertised the pamphlet biweekly for over a year from 29 April 1854 to 30 June 1855. Royal Gazette (St John’s), 6 June 1854 (Courier, 10 June 1854), Ernest Hawkins to Duke of Newcastle, 22 April, 2 June 1854; Royal Gazette (St John’s), 6 June 1854 (Courier [St John’s], 10 June 1854), Bishop Edward Feild to Governor K.B. Hamilton. spg, a215, Bishop Edward Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 10 September 1850. Courier (St John’s), 10 June 1854; Weekly Herald (Harbour Grace), 14 June 1854; Collett, Church of England, 4–5. However, Robert John Parsons at the Patriot was not impressed. He placed the very notion of voluntary subscription in the category of “such absurdities” (Patriot [St John’s], 24 June 1854). ncs, Report, 1854, 8; Feild, Address on the System of the Church Society, 13–14; Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, 268, Thomas Collett, Harbour Buffett, to Charles Simms, 26 December 1856. spg, a222, William White, Quarterly Report, Harbor Buffet, 30 June 1854; William White, Quarterly Report, Harbor Breton, Christmas 1855 (4); Times (St John’s), 31 January 1855. Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G., 858–9; spg, a196, Annual Report, Harbour Buffett, 23 November 1855; Times (St John’s), 14 June 1854; Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, 268, Thomas Collett to Charles Simms, Harbour Buffett, 26 December 1856; ibid., 267, Thomas Collett, Harbour Buffett, to Henry Deck, 9 February 1857. Journal of the House of Assembly, 1859, appendix, Education, “Schools in Newfoundland under the Direction of the Colonial Church and School Society of London, 1858,” Charles Simms, chairman, 31 December 1858, 368– 9; gn 2/2, box 41, July to December, 1853, pew holders and members of St Thomas’s, to Governor K.B. Hamilton, 26 August 1853. Simms, in a letter of 16 March 1860, was still warning the nss committee against “the tractarian tendencies” of Bishop Feild (10 May 1860, c&ccs, General Committee Minute Book, 1855–1861, 691). Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward,” appendix, 266–7, 269–71, appendix, Thomas Collett, Harbour Buffett, to Henry Deck, 9 February 1857; ibid., George Berley, Liverpool, to Ernest Hawkins, 13 April 1857; ibid., Ernest

Notes to pages 223–5

172 173 174

175

176

177

178 179 180

181

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183

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Hawkins, London, to George Berley, 17 April 1857; ibid., George Berley, Liverpool, to Charles Simms, 24 April 1857; Poole and Cuff, “James A. Simms,” Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, 5:193. nss, Annual Report … 1857–1858, 110; Courier (St John’s), 29 October 1853. [nss], Proceedings … 1849–1850, 9. The report also recorded that Collett donated £5 to the society that year (44). Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, 266–7, Thomas Collett, Harbour Bufett, to Henry Deck, 9 February 1857; John Haddon, Bonavista, to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 20 February 1854, Courier (St John’s), 22 April 1854. Emma Collett to Thomas E. Collett, 30 October 1853 (author’s collection); Courier (St John’s), 29 October 1853; Hollett, “Resistance to Bishop Edward Feild,” appendix, 266–7, Thomas Collett, Harbour Buffett, to Henry Deck, 9 February 1857. The society bought the property of Robert Evans at Harbour Buffett (259, John Stephenson, sheriff, Ferryland, to Richard Thomas Collett, 3 June 1853). nss, Annual Report … 1857–1858, 110; Journal of the House of Assembly, 1859, appendix, Education, “Schools in Newfoundland under the Direction of the Colonial Church and School Society of London, 1858,” Charles Simms, chairman, 31 December 1858, 368; “Report upon the Inspection of Protestant Schools in Newfoundland, for the Year 1858,” John Haddon, inspector, 16 February 1858, 279–80. soas, wmms, North America, Correspondence, box 1, 1791–1819/20, file 26, John Lewis, Burin, 14 September 1818; Methodist Magazine, 1817, 873; uc Archive, wy 200, Burin, box 1, “Register of Baptisms in the District of Burin 1817–1818,” John Lewis – Methodist Missionary. Thirty years later, the missionary John Brewster still saw Sound Island as the northeast boundary of his circuit (Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1849, 1131). Pascoe, Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G., 857; spg, Report … 1825, 51. wmms, reel 21, 1828–1831, William Wilson, Burin, 18–20 October 1828. [Wix], Six Months of a Newfoundland Missionary’s Journal, 47–9, 61–2. Winter quarters at Piper’s Hole were utilized not just for wood, but also for caribou. spg a194, William Jeynes to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 12 October 1840; Bishop Aubrey Spencer to A.M. Campbell, 16 November 1841; William Jeynes to Archdeacon Thomas Bridge, 21 December 1840; a195, George Cowan to Bishop Aubrey Spencer, 16 May 1842. wmms, reel 27, 1842–1845, S.W. Sprague, Burin, 5 November 1845; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Missions on the Western and Southern Coast, 1845, 16. wmms, 597, reel 28, 1846–1848, John Brewster, Burin, 12 October 1848.

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Notes to pages 225–30

wmms, reel 28, 1846–1848, Samuel W. Sprague, Burin, 10 November 1847. Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1857. Diary of John Collett, 26 October 1926, property of Collett family, St John’s. Neary, White Tie and Decorations, 192.

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6

7

8

9

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Rogers, Historical Geography of the British Colonies, 210. Innis, Cod Fisheries, 218, 378–9. Butler, Buffett before Nightfall, 76. Innis, Cod Fisheries, 379; Journal of the Legislative Council, 1837, appendix, Fisheries, letters 31 August 1836, 15 September 1837; Journal of the House of Assembly, 1836, appendix, Fisheries, Report of 6 August 1835, 223; rpa, gn 2/2, 1846, box 32, Thomas E. Gaden to James Spearman, 6 November 1845. Beamish, Hillier, and Johnstone, Mansions and Merchants of Poole and Dorset, 22; McDonald, “Poole, 1815–1881,” 29–30, 36–9. See the detailed account of the assets for sale at Burin, Oderin, Barren Island, and Isle Valen in the auction of the bankrupt estate of Christopher Spurrier & Co. on 7 May 1831 (Royal Gazette [St John’s], 19 April 1831). “Journal of John Lewis,” 1.01, 28 April 1815; 1.05, 20, 25 June 1817; 4 August 1817; 1.06. 8 November 1817. See also 1.02, 7 August, 20 October, 6 November 1815; 1.03, 3 January, 16 March, 9 April, 31 October, 22 November 1816; wmms, box 2, 1819/20–23/25, file 51, John Lewis, Burin, to Joseph Taylor, 17 December 1819. spg, a190, Thomas Grantham to Anthony Hamilton, 10 December 1816; Thomas Grantham, 13 June 1817; a194, Bishop Aubrey Spencer to A.M. Campbell, 1 August 1841. spg, Report … 1825, 52; [Inglis], “An Account of the State of the Schools in the Island of Newfoundland … 1827,” 10; Report for 1827, 101; Report for 1829, 117; Report for 1830, 90–1; Report for 1831, 111–12. Methodist Magazine, 1816, 469; ibid., 1817, 873; wmms, reel 15, 1800–1817, William Ellis, Sampson Busby, John Pickavant, Carbonear, to Thomas Blanshard, London, 6 January 1815. wy 100, box 1, 1829–73, “Minutes, Newfoundland District, Wesleyan Methodist Church, 1829–50.” wmms, box 1, 1791–1819/20, file 48, Hannah Goddard, Burin, to Joshua Bryan, England, 5 June 1819. Bryan had been in Newfoundland and had returned to England. “Journal of John Lewis,” 1.08, 11 December 1818; wmms, 597, reel 22, 1831, John Smithies, Burin, 13 December 1831.

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13 Semple, Lord’s Dominion, 19. 14 As the Methodist missionary William Wilson described it, wmms, 597, reel 20, 1825–28, William Wilson, Burin, 25 July 1826. 15 Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1845: 588 Anglicans, 519 Methodists. 16 spg, a194, Journal of Bishop Spencer’s Visit to Placentia Bay, July 1843. 17 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1827, 641, William Wilson, Wesley Vale. 18 spg, a196, Charles Blackman, 13 November 1843; Public Ledger (St John’s), 16 June, 22 August 1843. Spencer complained of ill health much of his life (Rowley, Anglican Episcopate, 215). 19 Gathercole, sent there as deacon in 1847, was ordained priest in 1852 (spg, Report … 1848, lxxi–lxxii; Public Ledger (St John’s), 11 June 1852). 20 spg, Report … 1847, lxvi. Fleet was no longer at Burin, but on the south shore, Conception Bay in 1846 (spg, a221, “Missionary ‘Returns’” 1845–1846). 21 Public Ledger (St John’s), 19 February 1847. 22 wmms, 597, reel 28, 1846–1848, Samuel Sprague, Burin, 14 December 1846. 23 Public Ledger (St John’s), 27 August 1847. 24 ncs, Report … 1847, 11–12; 1848, 11; 1849, 11. Bridge, as the secretary, “framed and in greater part composed” the annual reports (ncs, Fourteenth Annual Report … 1856, 11). 25 spg, Report … 1847, lxvii–lxix. Feild, to his credit, let the governor use the Hawk to freight coal and bread to the people of Burin and area (Welch, “Newfoundland Church-Ship Hawk,” 127). 26 wmms, 597, reel 28, 1846–1848, George Ellidge, 27, 29 December 1847. 27 wmms, 597, reel 28, 1846–1848, John Brewster, 10 December 1847; ibid., Samuel Sprague, 10 November 1847. 28 Times (St John’s), 25 September 1847; Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 90, 92; Wordsworth, Theophilus Anglicanus, 8, 79–90, 112–20. 29 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation, 1848, 105; Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast, 1845, 15–16. 30 Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 109; Times (St John’s), 14 August 1850; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), 40 (October 1850): 158. 31 White, “Robert Dyer Diary, 1841–1859,” 13 July 1859. 32 Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1845: 588 Anglicans, 519 Methodists; 1857: 632 Anglicans, 780 Methodists; 1869: 407 Anglicans, 1,111 Methodists. 33 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation, 1849, 4–5. 34 spg, a217, C.F. Bennett to Bishop Edward Feild, 5 July 1858; Report to Bishop Edward Feild from William Kepple White, Joseph Francis Phelps, William Frederick Meek, 16 July 1858; Bishop Edward Feild to Burin Churchwardens,

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46 47 48 49 50

Notes to pages 237–42

2 October 1858; a218, Bishop Edward Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 13 September 1860, 5 October 1860. Christian Guardian 69 (May 1814): 173, David Rowland, St John’s, 23 December 1813; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), 59 (May 1852): 409; spg, Sermon … 1831, 113. Public Ledger (St John’s), 16 May 1851. See PANL, gn 2/2, 1851, box 37, Stephen Olive Pack to colonial secretary, 30 July 1851; Times (St John’s), 30 August 1851, “The Visitation of the Lord Bishop, 1851,” 30 July 1851. Public Ledger (St John’s), 23 May 1851; Courier (St John’s), 22 December 1852; Collett, Church of England, 23–4; Collett, Church of England, No. 2, 24; Rozier would not bury an infant of Methodist parents (Courier [St John’s], 16 December 1854, 10 March 1855). panl, gn 2/2, 1851, box 37, Stephen Olive Pack to Christopher Ayre, acting colonial secretary, 7 October 1851; ibid., Stephen Olive Pack to colonial secretary, 30 July 1851; wy 103, box 1, “Newfoundland District Spiritual State Reports, 1840–1857,” John S. Peach, 1851, Grand Bank. Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1857: 330 Anglicans, 3 Methodists; 1869: 324 Anglicans, 4 Methodists. Times (St John’s), 13 October 1855, [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation of the Southern and Western Coasts in the Church-Ship, 1855,” 2–3 September 1855; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation, 1849, 7. Times (St John’s), 30 August 1851, “The Visitation of the Lord Bishop, 1851,” 30 July 1851; spg, a237, A.E. Gabriel, December 1869; 31 December 1870. wmms, reel 29, 1849–52, John Brewster, Burin, 9 March 1850. Provincial Wesleyan, 6 May 1863, letter from J.S. Phinney, Burin, 2 April 1863. The revivals continued though more sedate (Provincial Wesleyan, 29 March 1865; 9 April 1873; Wesleyan, 5 April 1879). spg, Incorporated Society … 1842, xlvi; Account, 10; Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St John’s, vertical file, “A Priest’s Golden Jubilee, Rev. Michael Berney, 1808–1886.” spg, Sermon … 1790, 36–7; Sermon … 1793, 40. Harris visited Placentia and Fortune Bays even after he transferred to St John’s (spg, Sermon … 1809, 29; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal [London], 59 [May 1852]: 407–8, letter of John Harries, St John’s, 26 October 1803). Wix, Six Months, 76; spg, Sermon… 1830, 89. spg, a192, Charles Blackman to Anthony Hamilton, 24 October 1824; spg, Sermon … 1825, 50. spg, Sermon … 1827, 76–7, 95, 101–2. spg, Sermon … 1830, 115–17. spg, Sermon … 1831, 96–116.

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51 Ibid., 114; Methodist Magazine, 1816, 235; ibid., 1821, 637; wmms, box 1, 1791– 1819/20, file 24, Richard Knight, Grand Bank, 14 April 1817; wmms, reel 19, 1824–1825, George Ellidge, Grand Bank, 23 October 1825; reel 20, 1825–1828, Simeon Noall, Grand Bank, 11 May 1827. 52 wmms, 597, reel 21, 1828–1831, George Ellidge, Burin, 12 June 1830. 53 wmms, 597, reel 18, 1822–3, William Wilson, Grand Bank, Journal, 18 November 1823; Provincial Wesleyan, 3 August 1864, William Wilson, “The Newfoundland Mission and Its Missionaries No. 28.” 54 spg, Sermon … 1830, 87; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation, 1849, 27. 55 wmms, reel 19, 1824–1825, William Wilson, Grand Bank, 7 April 1824. 56 spg, Sermon … 1830, 82; wmms, box 4, 1828/29–1833/34, file 180, Richard Shepherd, Grand Bank, 5 December 1831; Wix, Six Months, 65–7, 69, 123; Butt, Early Settlers of Bay St George, 182–3. 57 Thomas Cochrane’s journal, 16 July 1827, Pam Perkins, “Thomas Cochrane and Newfoundland in the 1820s,” 159–60. These were the Strickland brothers, though Wix later said that it was the brothers who led the service (Wix, Six Months, 114–16). 58 wmms, box 4, 1828/29–1833/34, file 175, Richard Shepherd, Jersey Harbour, 25 June 1830. 59 Methodist Magazine, 1820, 293; Moore, Methodism in the Channel Islands, 14– 17; Watson, History of the Methodist Church, 1:57–8. 60 wmms, box 1, 1791–1819/20, file 24, Richard Knight, Grand Bank, 14 April 1817; box 2, 1819/20–1823/25, file 52, John Haigh, Grand Bank, to Joseph Taylor, 2 November 1820; file 72, John Oliver, Grand Bank, to Joseph Taylor, 18 October 1821. 61 spg, Sermon … 1831, 98–9. Robertson continued to have services in both places the weeks he was at Harbour Breton (ibid., 104, 115). 62 qel, “William Marshall, Diary, 1839–1842,” 16–21, 28 July 1839, 19–20 October 1839, 25 December 1839, 3, 6 February 1840; “John S. Peach Diaries, 1841–1855,” 20, 22 June 1842, 11 October 1842, 6–12 November 1842. 63 qel, “William Marshall, Diary, 1839–1842,” 13 November 1841, 8 February 1842. 64 spg, a192, Thomas M. Wood, Petty Harbour, 1 January 1836. 65 spg, a193, Thomas Boone, Harbour Breton, to Archdeacon Bridge, 8 March 1842. 66 John Marshall was appointed to Grole, and T.B. Polden to Belleoram (nss, Proceedings … 1843–1844, 12, 16). 67 wmms, reel 27, 1842–1845, John S. Peach, Hermitage Cove, 30 September 1842. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid.; Lives of Missionaries, North America, 208–9. Yet a decade later, the Tractar-

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79 80 81 82 83 84

Notes to pages 247–50

ian Jacob Mountain said he had no success “in drawing the labouring men on the ‘Rooms’ … to church” (231). wmms, reel 27, 1842–1845, John S. Peach, Hermitage Cove, 22 November 1842; qel, “John S. Peach Diaries, 1841–1855,” 14 November 1842. spg, a195, Edward Feild, November 1845. nss, Proceedings … 1843–1844, 21; wmms, reel 20, 1825–28, William Wilson, Burin, Journal, 9–14 December 1826, 3–18 January 1827; William Wilson, Wesley Vale, 17 June 1827; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1827, 641–2; ibid., 1828, 58, William Wilson, Burin, 17 May 1827. wmms, reel 26, 1841–1842, William Marshall, Hermitage Cove, 21 July 1841; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), 11 (May 1848): 428, “Extract of a Letter of a Missionary [J.G. Mountain] in Newfoundland,” Grand Bank, 8 October 1847. spg, a193, Edward Wix to Archdeacon Hamilton, 13 September 1831. qel, “William Marshall, Diary, 1839–1842,” 24 January, 11 April 1841. wmms, box 6, 1837/38–1841/42, file 288, William Marshall, Jersey Harbour, 15 October 1840; wmms, reel 26, 1841–1842, William Marshall, Hermitage Cove, 21 July 1841. spg, Sermon … 1830, 82; Report for 1821, 56–7; Butt, Early Settlers of Bay St George, 196. Archdeacon George Coster said that one spg schoolmaster, though a good one, should be dismissed “for example’s sake” because, although he reads the Church of England service, he “gratifies his vanity elsewhere by praying and preaching extempore.” He was probably referring to John Curtis at Portugal Cove (spg, a192, Archdeacon George Coster to Anthony Hamilton, 27 August 1824). wmms, reel 35, 1823–1855, “Condensed Reports of the Work of God in the Newfoundland District, 1842,” William Marshall, Hermitage and western shore; Arminian Magazine, 1785, 27, 85. “Journal of John Lewis,” 1.07, 10 August 1818; Sunday Service of the Methodists, 1–17. wmms, reel 20, 1825–28, Grand Bank, Simeon Noall, Grand Bank, 11 May 1827; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1828, 207. Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1824, 642; wmms, reel 21, 1828–1831, William Wilson, Burin, 5 November 1828. qel, “William Marshall, Diary, 1839–1842,” 6 August 1839; “John S. Peach Diaries, 1841–1855,” 24 June 1842; Wix, Six Months, 121. qel, “William Marshall, Diary, 1839–1842,” 14 October 1839; 9–24 September 1841. qel, “William Marshall, Diary, 1839–1842,” 5 March 1840; “John S. Peach Diaries, 1841–1855,” 12 September 1842; Wix, Six Months, 114–16.

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85 wmms, box 4, 1828/29–1833/34, file 178, John Pickavant, St John’s, 5 January 1831; file 207, John Pickavant, Brigus, 14 July 1834; box 5, 1833/34–1837/38, file 227, Ingham Sutcliffe, Grand Bank, 6 July 1835; Wix, Six Months, 62. 86 Feild, Charge Delivered to the Clergy … 1866, 18–19. 87 Feild, “Charge Delivered to Clergy of Bermuda … 1845.” 88 [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast … 1845, 13; spg, a195, Edward Feild, November 1845; C/Canada/Newfoundland, box 7, Edward Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 25 September 1845. 89 Bishop Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 4 April 1848, quoted in Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 84–6; spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 11 November 1847. 90 “Jacob George Mountain,” dcb, 8:644. 91 a196, Carter, Mountain, Abraham, Newfoundland Mission of Rev. J.G. Mountain, 3; Lives of Missionaries: North America, “Memoir of the Reverend Jacob George Mountain,” 207–8, 216–17, 220–1, 226, 231; Mission Life 4 (1873): 434, 439, “‘Unknown and Yet Well Known,’ Jacob George Mountain”; Leader, “The Hon. Reverend William Grey, M.A.,” 90–1, 107–8. 92 Record, 19 November 1846; Lives of Missionaries: North America, “Memoir of the Reverend Jacob George Mountain,” 221–2, 224–8, 236, 238–40, 245–6; Burin had a large “winter housing” population and many went as far west as “the Western Shore.” It was the tendency of some over time to make their winter quarters their permanent location (Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1827, 641). 93 Jacob G. Mountain, Harbour Breton, Quarterly Report, “Log of the Mission Yacht,” 5, 20 August 1854. 94 spg, a197, W.K. White, Harbour Breton, 31 December 1855; a222, Report of W.K. White, Harbour Breton, Christmas 1854; a225, W.K. White, Harbour Breton, 30 June 1858. 95 Doyle, Newfoundlander in Exile, 1–4, 11–13; Tocque, Wandering Thoughts; gn 2/2, 1848, box 34, Philip Tocque to James Crowdy, Harbour Breton, 28 August 1848. “Justice,” a writer in 1844, said, “There are not six families in the place beyond those belonging to or connected with … Messrs Newman & Co.” (Public Ledger [St John’s], 23 July 1844). For a study of power relations in Harbour Breton, see Macdonald, “Really No Merchant,” 107–36. 96 gn 2/2, 1856, box 45, Thomas E. Gaden to John Kent, 22 May 1856. Gaden’s family withdrew their church membership shortly after the arrival of White (Macdonald, “Really No Merchant,” 132). 97 gn 2/2, 1853, box 41, Thomas E. Gaden to James Crowdy, 25 October 1853. 98 gn 2/2, 1848, box 34, Philip Tocque to James Crowdy, Harbour Breton, 28 August 1848; Census of Newfoundland, 1845.

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Notes to pages 256–60

99 nss, Proceedings … 1848–1849, 18; Proceedings, 1853, 12. 100 spg, a193, Archdeacon Wix to Archdeacon Hamilton, 8 August 1831; Edward Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 15 February 1845, November 1845. 101 nss, Annual Report … 1869, 58. Bishop Feild noted that during his 1868 visit to Fortune Bay, travelling with Sophia and without the Hawk, he received “the undiminished kindness and hospitality” of Marshall three times (Feild, “The Lord Bishop’s Late Visit to Fortune Bay,” 27, 29–30 August, 2 September 1868). 102 spg, a222, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay, Michaelmas 1854; spg, Sermon … 1830, 88; Sermon … 1831, 100; nss, Annual Report … 1853–1854, 67. 103 spg, a222, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay, Michaelmas 1854; a225, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay, December 1858. English merchants had their agents in Newfoundland to take care of matters, but Hunt and John Slade of Twillingate and Fogo were two rare cases of the merchants themselves giving significant local endowments to the Church of England in Newfoundland. Hunt was governor of the Bank of England (1867–69). 104 O’Dea, “William Grey,” quoted in Coffman, Gothic Newfoundland, 136. 105 spg, a222, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay, Michaelmas 1854; a225, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay, December 1858. The foundation of another church was laid in 1920 (“Hermitage Parish,” Diocesan Magazine 33 [March 1921]: 104). 106 spg, a223, Jacob G. Mountain, Hermitage Bay, Annual Return, 1853; a216, J.G. Mountain, Harbour Breton, to church member, [1852], an accompanying letter William Thomas sent to the Committee of the spg, 26 December 1853. a222, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay, Michaelmas 1854; White calculated that coal cost him at least £12 per year (a222, W.K. White, Harbour Breton, to spg, Christmas 1854). 107 Prowse, History of Newfoundland, 524–5, supplement, 21; Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 136–8. 108 spg, a193, Edward Wix, St John’s, 28 December 1830; a197, W.K. White, Harbour Buffett, Christmas 1853; gn 2/2, 1856, box 45, Thomas E Gaden to John Kent, 22 May 1856; Record, 19, 26, 30 November 1846, 28 January 1850, 4 February 1850, 5 September 1853, 3 November 1853, 23, 30 March 1854. For the ultra-Protestantism and transatlantic role of the Record, see Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World, 4, 141. 109 Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1842, 1073; 1844, 1074; 1854, abridged, “The Recent Church Movement at Leeds,” 577–83. 110 nss, Proceedings … 1843–1844, 20–1 111 Wix, Six Months, 130–1. 112 spg, a194, William Jeynes, “A Statement of the Protestant Population Living in Fortune and Placentia Bays, 1840”; a222, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay,

Notes to pages 260–6

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Michaelmas 1854; a197, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay, 24 June 1855; wmms, reel 28, 1846–1848, Adam Nightingale, 10 December 1846; reel 29, 1849–1852, S.W. Sprague, Burin, 10 November 1847; reel 30, 1852–1853, Edmund Botterell to Elijah Hoole, 26 October 1852. 113 spg, a227, Edward Colley, Hermitage Cove, Feast of Annunciation, 1861. 114 Mission Field 8 (August 1863): 183, Edward Colley, Hermitage Bay, 21 December 1862. 115 Census of Newfoundland, 1869; spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Hawkins, 20 June 1848; a225, W.K. White, Harbour Breton, 31 December 1858.

chapter eight 1 spg, a192, Peter Pering to Anthony Hamilton, 14 August 1827; Wilson, Newfoundland and Its Missionaries, 400. 2 spg, Sermon … 1831, 96, 104–9. 3 spg, Sermon … 1830, 85–7; Wix, Six Months 147–8. 4 wmms, 597, reel 18, 1822–3, William Wilson, Grand Bank, Journal, 18 November 1823; Provincial Wesleyan, 3 August 1864, William Wilson, “The Newfoundland Mission and Its Missionaries No. 28”; spg, Sermon … 1830, 87; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 27. 5 wmms, reel 26, 1841–1842, William Marshall, Hermitage Cove, 1 November 1841; reel 25, 1838–1840, William Marshall, Gaultois, 4 December 1839. 6 spg, Incorporated … 1842, 23, “Diocese of Newfoundland”; a194, Journal of Bishop Spencer’s visit to Placentia Bay, 3 July 1843. 7 spg, a196, Martin Blackmore to Bishop Spencer, 18 May 1842; [Feild], A Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast … 1845, 12; Blackmore, “Journal of Martin Blackmore,” 15–19 August 1845. 8 Blackmore, “Journal of Martin Blackmore,” 30 January, 5, 13, 27 February, 13 March, 26 November 1845, 28 January 1846, 26, 30 May 1847. 9 Blackmore, “Journal of Martin Blackmore,” 23 July 1845, 26 June 1846, 20 February, 2 May, 29 June, 24, 28 August, 21, 29 September, 28 October, 1, 29 November, 21 December 1847, 3 March 1848. 10 Blackmore, “Journal of Martin Blackmore,” 18 May, 25 June, 18 September 1847; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 24–5. 11 Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 86; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 11, 22; Small, “Vital Statistics of Burgeo, ”Newfoundland Quarterly 40 (December 1940): 22. 12 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 17–20.

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Notes to pages 266–70

13 Leader, “The Hon. Reverend William Grey, M.A.,” 103; Grey “Ecclesiology of Newfoundland,” 159; Small, “Vital Statistics of Burgeo”; Public Ledger (St John’s), 11 June 1852; [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation of the Southern and Western Coasts in the Church-Ship, 1855,” 14 August 1855; [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1859,” 30 August 1859. 14 wmms, reel 30, 1852–1853, John S. Peach, Western Shore, 15 May 1854; spg, a196, Martin Blackmore, Burgeo Islands, May 1847. 15 Blackmore, “Journal of Martin Blackmore,” 26 October 1845, 5 April, 25 October 1846, 25 April 1847, 9 April 1848; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 23–4. 16 The Anglican clergyman W.W. Le Gallais noted that there were three families at Habour Le Cou, five families at Garia, and “the whole of Petites” who had “come from Grand Bank and were Methodists before.” spg a196, W.W. Le Gallais, Port aux Basques, to Bishop Feild, 6 November 1857. John S. Peach, writing in 1855, stated that at Garia there were “nineteen or twenty families more the greater part Wesleyan” (wmms, reel 31, 1854–67, John S. Peach, Grand Bank, to secretaries, 10 December 1855). The 1857 census, however, listed Garia as having 75 Church of England and 54 Methodist adherents, and Petites as having 49 Church of England and 120 Methodist adherents (Census of Newfoundland, 1857). 17 Blackmore, “Journal of Martin Blackmore,” 2 August 1846; Wesleyan, 1, 8 December 1849. 18 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation, 1849, 30–1. 19 Blackmore, “Journal of Martin Blackmore,” 5 September 1845, 12 October 1847. 20 [Feild], A Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast, 1845, 10–12; Blackmore, “Journal of Martin Blackmore,” 10 April, 9–10 August, 10 September, 11 October 1845, 5 July, 25 July–6 August 1846, 4–8 September 1847. 21 spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, secretary, 11 November 1847; a198, J.P. Fletcher, London, to spg, 21 April 1845; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 16, 24 June, 1847. 22 Times (St John’s), 30 August 1851, “The Visitation of the Lord Bishop, 1851,” 15 June 1851; a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 13 December 1849, 17 November 1852, 14 June, 1 July, 30 September 1854, 13 December 1855, 11 June 1856; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to W.T. Bullock, 24 August 1852; Thomas Appleby, La Poile, to Bishop Feild, 12 July 1852; Thomas Appleby, La Poile, 22 November 1855. 23 a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 5 February 1856. 24 spg, a216, Bishop Feild, Burin, the Church Ship, to Ernest Hawkins, 26 September 1855.

Notes to pages 270–3

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25 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 26 September, 20 October 1855, 26 January 1856, April 1856, 30 April 1856. 26 spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 10 June 1858; Bishop Feild, St John’s, to W.T. Bullock, 13 October 1869; Bishop Feild, City of Halifax, en route to Bermuda, to W.T. Bullock, 31 October 1869. 27 [Feild], A Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast … 1845, 11–12; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation …1848, 86–91; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 31–2. 28 a249, Bishop Feild, Church Ship, Burin, to Ernest Hawkins, 26 September 1855; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 86–91; [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation of the Southern and Western Coasts in the Church-Ship, 1855,” 19–22 July 1855. 29 [Feild], A Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast … 1845, 10. 30 “William Marshall, Diary, 1839–1842,” 26, 30 August, 1 September 1839; wmms, box 6, 1837/38–41/42, file 288, William Marshall, Jersey Harbour, 15 October 1840; reel 29, 1849–1852, John S. Peach, Burin, 26 November 1850; [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation… 1849, 33. 31 spg a216, Bishop Feild to Ernest Hawkins, Burin, The Church Ship, 26 September 1855. 32 Ibid.; Times (St John’s), 10 October 1855, [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation of the Southern and Western Coasts in the Church-Ship, 1855,” 23 July 1855. 33 spg a216, Bishop Feild to Ernest Hawkins, Burin, the Church Ship, 26 September 1855; [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation of the Southern and Western Coasts in the Church-Ship, 1855,” 23 July 1855. 34 wmms, reel 31, 1854–1867, John S. Peach, Grand Bank, to secretaries, 10 December 1855; John S. Peach, Grand Bank, to John Beecham, 10 December 1855; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1857, 945. 35 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 34; Mission Field 3 (March 1858): 50, Bishop Feild, St John’s, 7 December 1857; ibid., 15 (January 1870): 4; ibid., 15 (March 1870): 85–7, “The Late W.W. Le Gallais,” Bishop Feild, to spg, 15 December 1869; spg, a227, W.W. Le Gallais, Channel, 18 February 1861. 36 Gospel Missionary (September 1862): 129–40, (March 1864): 43; spg Quarterly Paper (January 1863): 1; Mission Field 32 (May 1887): 141. 37 wmms, reel 31, 1854–1867, John S. Peach, Grand Bank, to John Beecham, 10 December 1855; Provincial Wesleyan, 9 January 1861; Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, 1858, 941. 38 Provincial Wesleyan, 9 October 1861, Joseph Gaetz, Petites, Western Shore, 12 September 1861; United Church of Canada Archives, Toronto, Charles Lad-

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44 45 46

47

48

49

50

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Notes to pages 274–8

ner, “Memoirs,” 38–9; Constitution and Bye-Laws of Sons of Temperance, title page. Provincial Wesleyan, 9 October 1861, Joseph Gaetz, Petites, Western Shore, 12 September 1861; 16 April 1862, Charles Ladner, Petites, 17 January 1862; 17 September 1862, John Winterbotham, Grand Bank, “Mission to the Western Shore,” 2 September 1862. Provincial Wesleyan, 9 October 1861, Joseph Gaetz, Petites, Western Shore, 12 September 1861; 16 April 1862, Charles Ladner, Petites, 17 January 1862; spg, a228, W.W. Le Gallais, Channel, 23 July 1861. spg, Report for the Year 1866, 62. Newman, Parochial Sermons, v2:400; see also Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 91. [Keble], “Evening,” Christian Year, 1:6; see also “Morning,” “The Nightingale,” and “Septuagesima Sunday,” in vol. 1; “The Groans of Nature,” “The Flowers of the Field,” and “Forest Leaves in Autumn” in vol. 2. Brosnan, Pioneer History of St George’s Diocese, 37–9, Thomas Sears, report to the Propaganda Fide, Rome, 1873. spg, Sermon … 1829, 115–17. spg, Sermon … 1830, 81–2; Baptismal Record for Horatio Henry Forrest, Drouin Collection, available from Ancestry.com, accessed 24 June 2015. I thank Kurt Korneski for this reference. Mission Field 3 (December 1858): 277, 280–1, W.W. Le Gallais, Channel, 17 August 1858; spg, a227, W.W. Le Gallais, Channel, 9 October 1860; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), 165 (March 1861): 99, W.W. Le Gallais, Channel, 9 October 1860; Tucker, Under His Banner, 348. Ecclesiastical Gazette, 12 December 1865, report of W.W. Le Gallais, Channel, to spg, 7 August 1865; Mission Field 19 (March 1874): 88–9, Thomas A. Goode, Channel, “A Year’s Work in Newfoundland.” Mission Life, 1878, J. Frewen Moor, “The Education of the Children of Missionaries,” 485; Mission Field 19 (March 1874): 88, Thomas A. Goode, Channel, “A Year’s Work in Newfoundland”; spg, a238, Thomas A. Goode, Channel, 27 May 1871. Coadjutor Bishop Kelly said that Le Gallais had “a zeal almost impetuous in its fervour” and lived “a life of unremitting sacrifice of self” (Mission Life, 1870, Kelly, “Faithful unto Death,” 98–9). spg, a228, W.W. Le Gallais, Channel, July 23, 1861; wy 500, box 1, “The Diary of James Nurse,” 26 August 1874; Mission Field 19 (March 1874): 87, Thomas A. Goode, Channel, “A Year’s Work in Newfoundland.” Census of Newfoundland, 1857, 1869; Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1874, 1884. spg, Sermon … 1830, 116; Report for 1831, 81–2. Wix, Six Months, 168, 187, 160–219; Mission Field 16 (April 1871) 233, F.G. Hall, “‘Out of the World’: Mission of St George’s Bay, Newfoundland.” Feild also reported in 1859 that they

Notes to pages 279–83

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64

65

66

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were “very respectable and live in much comfort” ( [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1859,” 15 August 1859). Mission Life 4 (1873): 485–7, F.G. Hall, “Reminiscences.” nss, Proceedings … 1841–1842, 10–11; Proceedings … 1842–1843, 11; Proceedings … 1843–1844, 17–18; Proceedings … 1844–1845, 11–12. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop’s Visitation of the Western and Southern Coast … 1845, 7–9; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 27–30. [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 39, 41; Mission Field 16 (August 1871): 234–5, F.G. Hall, “‘Out of the World’: Mission of St George’s Bay, Newfoundland”; Mannion, “Settlers and Traders in Western Newfoundland,” 234–7. nss, Proceedings … 1844–1845, 10–11; Proceedings … 1846–1847, 30; Proceedings … 1849–1850, 5–6. nss, Proceedings … 1848–1849, 11–13; nss, Annual Report … 1851, 25. nss, Proceedings … 1849–1850, 6; spg, a249, Bishop Feild, Church Ship, Burin, to Ernest Hawkins, 26 September 1855. nss, Proceedings … 1848–1849, 12; nss, Annual Report … 1851, 26; Mission Feild, March 1870, letter of Bishop Feild to spg, 15 December 1869, 86. nss, Proceedings … 1849–1850, letter of William Meek, 5 October 1849, 5; Record, 14, 18 June 1849. nss, Annual Report … 1851, letter of William Meek, 10 August 1850; Record, 28 January, 4 February 1850. spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 6 May 1850; [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation of the Southern and Western Coasts in the Church-Ship, 1855,” 1 August 1855. spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 6 May, 30 September 1850; [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1853, 104; Mission Field 18 (August 1873): 239, Dean of Lichfield, “A Biographical Sketch of the Late Rev. T. Boland, a Newfoundland Missionary”; Mission Life 4 (1873): 4–5, F.G. Hall, “Sunshine and Shadow”; ncs, Report, 1856, 14; spg, Quarterly Paper 98 (October 1856): 2–3; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), 114 (December 1856): 207–8; Taylor, Westward with Henry and Caroline, 47. spg, a249, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 11 June, 10 July 1856, 8 January 1857; ibid., Henry Lind, St John’s, to W.T. Bullock, 6 January 1857; Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 205–6. spg, a222, Henry Lind, Journal, 1853, Heart’s Delight, 21 September 1853; Taylor, Westward with Henry and Caroline, 23, 31, 34, 101; qel, “Diary of Rev. Henry Lind of Sandy Point,” 12 July, 3, 5 September 1857. qel, “Diary of Rev. Henry Lind of Sandy Point,” 28, 30 April 1862, 28 April

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80

Notes to pages 283–7

1863, 23 April 1864[?]. In 1862 and 1863 the people of Sandy Point and Barachoix gave just under £40 each year (ncs, Report, 1862, appendix, subscribers, xxii–xxiii; Report, 1863, appendix, subscribers, xv–xvi). qel, “Diary of Rev. Henry Lind of Sandy Point,” 7, 16 August, 27 September, 30 October, 1, 3 November 1857, 3, 8 January 1858, 2 February, 5 March, 27 April 1862, 1 April 1864]?]; Occasional Papers 135 (February 1871): 10, Frederic Hall, St George’s Bay, to Henry Bailey, 24 September 1870; Mission Field 27 (July 1882): 234, “Report of the Rev. Charles Jeffrey”; Feild, Order and Uniformity, 17–18. Middle Barachoix may be Mckays (Taylor, Westward with Henry and Caroline, 63). Mission Feild 13 (November 1868): 324; [Feild], “The Lordship’s Late Visitation,” 1867, 19 August 1867. Wix, Six Months, 169–74. spg, Sermon … 1836, 30–3, 87–91. Tucker, Under His Banner, 342. Wix, Six Months, 172; spg, Report for 1836, 30–3; spg, a194, Bishop Aubrey Spencer, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 23 July 1841; spg, Report for 1841, xlviii; spg, Report for 1842, xlv. nss, Proceedings … 1840–1841, 10; Proceedings … 1841–1842, 10. spg, a194, Bishop Aubrey Spencer, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, 23 July 1841; a194, Bishop Aubrey Spencer to A.M. Campbell, Twillingate, 2 August 1841. nss, Proceedings … 1841–1842, 11. The report of the next year offered the explanation that at Bay St George “he was likely to be detained for a considerable time,” Proceedings … 1842–1843, 10. [Feild], Journal of the Bishop of Newfoundland’s Voyage of Visitation … 1848, 81; Mission Field 5 (December 1860): 274; Parochial Missionary Magazine 1 (1849): 111. For “commination,” see Book of Common Prayer, 281–9, “Denouncing of God’s Anger and Judgement against Sinners.” Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), 31 (January 1850): 243. [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 43–54; Hackett, Got a Story to Tell Ye from Newfoundland, 12. As did White Bay later. spg, a217, extract from Bishop Feild’s Journal, 1859, White Bay. [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation of the Southern and Western Coasts in the Church-Ship, 1855,” 8 August 1855. See another instance of homeschooling at Blanc Sablon, [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 71. [Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 36– 9; Telegraph (St John’s), 19 October 1859, [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1859,” 7 August 1859.

Notes to pages 287–92

375

81 Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of Edward Feild, 179, Bishop Feild, the Church Ship, off Port aux Basques, to Canon Seymour, 31 August 1863. 82 Rule, Reminiscences of My Life, 6–22, 89–90. Rule’s book is reinforced by information from his private letters, “all returned to me,” which he used as reference (preface). 83 [Feild], “The Lordship’s Late Visitation,” 2–4 August 1867; Rule, Reminiscences of My Life, 27, 33, 44; Mission Field 18 (August 1873), 236, Ulric Rule, “Seven Years in a Newfoundland Mission.” 84 Jelf, Life of Joseph James Curling, 1–16. 85 Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 139–41; Jelf, Life of Joseph James Curling, 38–9. 86 Brosnan, Pioneer History of St George’s Diocese, 28–9, Thomas Sears, Bay of Islands, to Bishop J.T. Mullock, 29 November 1868; Census of Newfoundland, 1869. 87 Jelf, Life of Joseph James Curling, 20–3. 88 [Feild], Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 29, 55–7; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), 89 (November 1854): 179–81, letter of Bishop Feild, St John’s, 19 September 1854; New Manual of Devotions. For more on John Paine, “a native of Jersey,” see Berger, The Good and Beautiful Bay, 91–2. 89 Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London), 89 (November 1854): 179, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to editor, 19 September 1854; ibid., 181, John Paine, Rocky Harbour, to Julian Moreton, 13 June, 1853; ibid., 92 (February 1855): 303–4. 90 [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Visitation of the Southern and Western Coasts in the Church-Ship, 1855,” 2–5 August 1855. 91 [Feild], “The Lord Bishop’s Voyage of Visitation in the Church-Ship, 1863,” 19–22 August 1863. 92 [Feild], “The Lordship’s Late Visitation,” 4 August 1867; [Feild], “A Summary of the Bishop’s Voyage”; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 318 (December 1873): 452–3, Avalonianus, “The Visitation of the Bishop of Newfoundland,” 1873; Rule, Reminiscences of My Life, 26, 33–4, 36, 55–6; Mission Life 6 (1875): 111, R. Holland Taylor, “On Board the Church Ship” [Lavrock], 24 June 1874; Mannion, “Settlers and Traders in Western Newfoundland,” 250–1; Coffman, Newfoundland Gothic, 154–5; Manuel, Woody Point 1800–1900, 10; Census of Newfoundland, 1869; Census of Newfoundland and Labrador, 1874. 93 Rule, Reminiscences of My Life, 60.

376

Notes to pages 293–9

conclusion 1 spg, a195, Bishop Feild, St John’s, to Ernest Hawkins, November 1845. 2 [Feild], Order and Uniformity, 13, 15, 20, 22, 25, 27, “Nothing can be too serious, earnest and holy,” 14. 3 [Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 26– 7; Colonial Church Chronicle (London), 213 (March 1865): 93, Bishop Feild, St John’s, 17 January 1865. 4 Occasional Papers 161 (April 1874): 6, Robert H. Taylor, Brigus, 31 October 1873; [Feild], Order and Uniformity, 16; Feild, Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Newfoundland … 1847, 9. 5 Feild, Journal of a Voyage of Visitation … 1849, 106. 6 Coffman, Gothic Newfoundland, 14–19. 7 Kalman, History of Canadian Architecture, 261, 286. 8 Westfall, Two Worlds, 126–58; Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 26, 303–4, 320–1; Kalman, History of Canadian Architecture, 296. 9 Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 178–9. 10 Ibid., 320–3. 11 Westfall, Two Worlds, 201, 206. 12 Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 178–9; Bishop Feild to Ernest Hawkins, 19 July 1844, quoted in Jones, “Bishop Feild: A Study in Politics and Religion,” 96. 13 [Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 12. 14 Peter Burke, on the problem of the “logic of appropriation,” quoted in Calaresu, de Vivo, and Rubies, “Peter Burke and the History of Cultural History,” 10–11; Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 330. 15 For example, Little Papers 1 (1881): 19–20, Hermitage Cove: altar cloths and altar linen; Twillingate: chalice veil. Ibid. 3 (1881): 96–7, 100, Hermitage Cove: portable font; Belleoram: surplice, stole, alms dish, altar linen, candlesticks for altar, altar cloth, carpet for chancel; Trinity: altar linen, font; Old Bonaventure: font, altar linen, alms dish; New Bonaventure: altar linen, alms dish; British Harbour: altar linen, altar cloths, alms dish; Delby’s Cove: communion plate; Ireland’s Eye: font, altar linen. Ibid. 4 (1881): 125, 127, Hermitage Cove: altar cloth, altar frontal and square; Greenspond: altar frontals. 16 Hilliard, “Anglo-Catholicism in Australia, c.1860–1960,” 118; Finley, “New Brunswick’s Gothic Revival,” 322. 17 Little Papers 1 (1881): 19–20, Harbour Grace, Twillingate; ibid. 3 (1881): 98–9, 101, Twillingate, Trinity, Harbour Grace; ibid. 4 (1881): 125, Twillingate; ibid.

Notes to pages 300–1

18 19 20 21

377

5 (1881): 195–6, Hermitage Cove, Bonne Bay; ibid. 1 (1882): 19–20, Hermitage Cove; ibid., 2 (1882): 54–6, Pinchard’s Island, Bonne Bay; ibid. 1 (1883): 18–9, Exploits, Channel; ibid. 8 (December 1883): 19, Greenspond; ibid. 2 (February 1884): 33–4, 42, Hermitage Cove, Belleoram. [Feild], Extracts from a Journal of a Voyage of Visitation in the “Hawk,” 1859, 15– 20, 30; [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 19 August 1857. Mission Life (June 1871): 340, Henry Bailey, “Ritual in Colonial and Missionary Churches.” Grey, “Ecclesiology of Newfoundland,” 156. [Feild], “Lord Bishop’s Visitation, 1857,” 3 September–22 October, 1857; Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal (London) 128 (February 1858): 79.

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Bibliography

403

Index

Act of Uniformity, 300 Addy, John S., 144, 172, 238 “after”: in Newfoundland speech, 331n28 agency. See popular agency Alleine, Joseph, 114 altar. See under Gothic altar candles, 297, 299, 376n15; at Brigus, 3, 83; at Harbour Buffett, 178, 199–201, 205, 208, 226–7, 355–6n96; in Tractarianism, 30, 37, 49, 53, 193, 200, 205. See also under Gothic American Civil War, 312n80 American Tract Society, 174 Anglicanism: High Church, 32–3; Low Church, 14, 18, 92, 246, 248, 258, 308n48; kitchen, 19, 38, 47, 81, 86, 132, 268, 276, 287, 292, 294, 296. See also evangelical Anglicanism; Tractarianism Anglo-Catholicism. See Tractarianism Anspach, Lewis Amadeus, 76 Anstey, William, 132 Anthoine, John, 245 Anthony, Henry, 145 Anticosti, 277 apostolic succession, 13, 30, 56, 166, 235, 323n67; and Methodism, 29,

125, 127, 261, 347n55; and Protestantism, 29, 55, 183, 323n67; and sacraments, 28–9, 42, 44, 54–5, 171, 189–90, 293 Appleby, Thomas, 46, 268–70, 272, 295 Appleby, Thomas, Mrs, 268 Aquaforte, 16, 38–9, 57 Archibald, E.M., 71 architecture. See Gothic; “Newfoundland style”; Romanesque Arminianism, 127 Arnold, Thomas, 33 artisans: blacksmiths, 115, 252; carpenters, 3, 24–5, 43, 47, 51–2, 83, 85, 87– 8, 91, 102–4, 106, 111, 117, 120–1, 128, 132–3, 136, 141–2, 145–6, 155–6, 159, 163, 165, 171, 179–80, 229, 235, 238–9, 252, 265–6, 272, 288; coopers, 229, 252; sailmakers, 50, 82; shipbuilders, 82, 103, 111, 300–1, 342n158; stonemasons, 39–40, 48, 63, 257 asceticism, 22, 32, 76, 83, 252 auricular confession, 44, 235; at Harbour Buffett, 194–6, 199, 205, 207; at Lamaline, 238; and Edward Pusey, 29, 187 Australia, 46, 299

404

Index

Auxiliary Wesleyan Missionary Society, 12–13 Ayre, Christopher, 204 Baccalieu Island, 98 Baggs, Joseph, 101 Bailey, Henry, 86, 300 Baine, Johnston & Co, 180 bait, 181, 197, 228–9, 233 Baker’s Tickle, 15 Balfour, James, 15, 76, 307n32, 325n2 baptism, 53, 107, 115, 152–3, 158, 225, 237, 245; hypothetical, 41, 54, 155, 286; lay, 8, 15, 41–2, 54, 80, 189–90, 238, 253, 285, 289–91, 294, 300, 313– 14n6; and payment issue, 91, 95–6, 162, 164, 258, 329n66; and payment issue at Harbour Buffett, 164, 186–8, 190–3, 195–7, 199, 210, 219; and proselytism, 285, 345n40; rebaptism, 29, 41, 54, 206, 237–8, 251, 261; by women, 8, 15, 300 baptismal regeneration, 29, 44, 53, 72, 90–1, 155, 189, 193, 235; denied by Reformed Church of England, 88; and Henry Phillpotts, 176–7, 187 Baptists, 48, 155, 176, 297, 310n58; at Channel-Port aux Basques, 268, 271– 2; at English Harbour West, 253–4; former, 46, 268, 295; at Moreton’s Harbour and Twillingate, 115–16, 124, 334n51; at Poole, 116 Bareneed, 89 Barr’d Islands, 5, 139, 144, 146–8 Barren Island, 362n5 barren land, 24, 34, 136, 151, 275, 314– 15n20 Bartlett, Abram, 3, 83, 294 Bartlett, John, 85 Basilica of St John the Baptist (St John’s), 7–8, 50–1; Bishop Feild’s

opinion of, 51, 319n1; Bishop Medley’s opinion of, 319n1; prominent location of, 7, 50–1, 63–4, 66–7; and ultramontanism, 6–8, 304n6 Battle Harbour: Bishop Feild’s hopes for, 151, 162–3; Gothic church at, 19, 165, 296, 346n50; and George Hutchinson, 164–8, 176, 287; Methodists at, 165; and migratory fishery, 160–2; Slades at, 162 Battle Island, 162, 165, 168–9 Baxter, Richard, 114 Bay de Este, 244 Bay d’Espoir, 241 Bay de Verde, 47, 74; evangelical Anglicanism at, 46, 90–2, 95–7, 187; opposition to Bishop Feild, 91–2, 98, 295 Bayly, Augustus, 183 Bay of Islands, 278–9, 288–9; beauty of, 286; early settlers in, 285–6; reports of immorality in, 276, 283–6 Bay Roberts, 48, 79–80, 94, 169, 172, 234, 284 Bay St George, 34, 59, 244, 248, 251, 264; fishery at, 280; Royal Navy at, 26, 279; settlers in, 276–80; violence at, 16 Beaumont. See Ward’s Harbour Belleoram, 254; early lay reader at, 244; evangelical Anglicanism at, 112, 246, 261, 295; John Marshall, nss teacher, at, 112, 256, 258, 261, 295; T.B. Polden, nss teacher at, 246, 376n15; visited by John Harris and John Evans from Placentia, 240; visited by James Robertson, 242 Bell Island, 20, 38 Bell, James, 134, 338n110 Bemister, John, 143 Bendle, Ann Maria, 201–2 Bendle, Bridget: and the Church Socie-

Index

ty, 207, 209; Methodist, 184, 226; testimony on Edith Kirby, 194, 196 Bendle, Thomas, 201; Methodist, 180, 184, 226; signed memorial to Bishop Spencer, 184 Bennett, Charles Fox: contributor to Harbour Buffett, 180; member of Church Society Committee, 60, 206, 236 Berley, George, 222 Bermuda, 4, 43, 45, 48, 52, 54, 58, 62, 67, 135, 152, 200; Joseph Curling at, 288; Bishop Feild’s winter quarters at, 24, 57, 64, 89, 121, 127, 231, 311n67; population of, 311–12n68; state-funded clergy at, 59, 156 Bethel flag, 68, 150, 162, 175 Bevan, Sophia, 88, 327–8n42, 368n101 Beverly, Thomas, 285 Bible, 36, 151, 155, 190, 198, 213; prominence in popular spirituality, xvii, 20, 86, 101, 108–11, 123, 147, 150, 156; Protestant focus on, 78, 82, 88, 90, 101, 116–17, 125–6, 161, 168, 176, 179, 182, 195, 209, 218, 224, 234, 265, 273, 292, 334n51 Bickersteth, Edward, 33 Bierstadt, Albert, 38 Binney, Hibbert, 44, 112, 308n47, 317n45 Birchy Cove (Curling), 289; Curling’s Gothic church at, 288, 291–2, 296; Ulric Rule at, 288, 291 Bird Island Cove (Elliston): Methodist revivals at, 99–100, 136 Bird, Joseph, 313–14n6 Birmingham, 116 black gown: at Harbour Grace, 79, 97– 8; at St John’s, 56–7, 78–9; symbol of evangelical Anglicanism, 31, 78 Black Island, 130

405

Blackman, Charles, 82, 137; dismissal from the Theological Institution, 45–6, 69, 234; disputes with Bishop Feild, 51, 69–70, 191; at St Thomas’s, 51, 191; visit to Placentia Bay, 17, 224, 229, 241 Blackmore, Martin, 22, 62, 266–8; evangelical focus of, 265, 292, 295 Blanchard, Mr (of Gillams): early resident, 285 Blanc Sablon, 332n30, 374n79 Blomfield, Charles, 56, 305n23; promoter of episcopacy in the colonies, 13; promoter of missions in Labrador, 151 Bluff Head Cove, 121 Bluff Head (in Hamilton Inlet), 171–2 Blundon, Tamsay, 95 Boland, Thomas: disparaged by Bishop Feild, 152–3, 163, 269; highly acclaimed, 281–2, 344n15 Bonavista, 22, 60, 101, 132, 138, 147, 172; archdeacon appointed at, 12; John Haddon at, 183, 209, 355n96; Methodist revivals at, 99–100; migration from, 104 Bond, George: “The Castaway of Fish Rock,” 169; Skipper George Netman, 150 Bonne Bay, 285, 289–91; Joseph Curling at, 288; herring fishery at, 289; migratory Methodists from Conception Bay at, 291; John Paine at, 290; Ulrich Rule at, 291 Bonne Bay (South Coast), 260 Bonne Esperance, 154, 173–4, 348n80 Book of Common Prayer, 124, 129, 141, 151, 176, 245, 271, 315–16n34; predominant in lay Anglicanism, 40–1, 111, 157, 161, 171, 179, 190, 223–4, 227, 238, 248, 250, 260, 278, 286, 290,

406

Index

292, 313n6; Puritan attitude to, 175; suited to mobile population, 19–20, 85, 111–12, 147, 156, 162, 173, 299; Tractarian debate over rubrics of, 14, 36, 300 Boone, Thomas, 46, 114; an evangelical Anglican, 118, 125, 139; at Fortune Bay, 245–7; and Hart’s Cove, 120–2; and loss of parishioners to Methodism, 118–19, 122, 125, 127–9, 147; views on Methodism, 122, 126 Boston, 48, 82, 94, 158, 173, 236 Boston Traveller, 82 Botterell, Edmund, 238; indignant over Tractarian rebaptism, 238; visit to the northeast coast, 130, 139, 142 Botwood, 26, 312n77 Botwood, Edward: at Bonne Bay, 291; at Forteau, 167–8; upset by Protestant ecumenism at Red Bay, 159 Bowell, John P., 345n37 Bowman, William, 134–5, 338n111; dismissed at Fogo by Bishop Feild, 134; received recommendation from archbishop of Canterbury, 338n11 Bragg, John, 264 Brake, Edward, 285 Brake, John, 289 Brake, Ralph, 285 Brenton, Thomas, 106 Brewster, John, 132, 225, 234, 237; and Grand Bank fishermen, 267 Bridge, Thomas Finch Hobday: archdeacon and commissary, 56, 64– 5, 69, 95, 164; chairman, Protestant Board of Education, 202; converted Tractarian, 46, 54–5, 57–8, 91–2, 138, 187, 225, 281, 320n26, 323n74, 339n122; Bishop Feild’s indispensable deputy in Newfoundland, 43, 52, 54, 56–8, 73, 138, 233, 265, 363n24;

joust with Governor Hamilton, 211– 6; ncs secretary and treasurer, 58, 60, 188, 200, 206, 208, 363n24; nss superintendent, 57; pamphlet by, 211; untimely death of, 282 Brigus, 136, 266; centre of Methodism, 3, 79–83, 87, 98; Congregationalists at, 326n16; and Labrador fishery, 172; major town of Conception Bay, 75; migration to Notre Dame Bay from, 86, 144; and Reformed Church of England, 88, 295; and sealing, 81–2, 85–6; and Tractarianism, 83, 86–8, 294–5, 299 Bristol, 115 British and Foreign Bible Society, 66; Protestant ecumenism of, 68, 173–4; rejected by Bishop Feild, 46, 67–8, 73, 119, 322–3n60 British Empire: Church of England and Royal Navy in, 26, 129–30, 134, 156, 160, 241–2, 250, 263–4, 312n78; Church of England a servant of order in, 15, 24, 26–7; rhetoric of, 34–5, 48–9, 136, 309n51, 318n65 British Harbour, 376n15 Broad Cove (St Phillips): favoured site for the Theological Institution, 45 Brodie, Jane: cfms missionary on Lower North Shore, 175–7 Bromsgrove, 183 Bryan, Joshua, 362n11 Bull Arm: transatlantic cable to, 30 Bullock, William: and Hibbert Binney, 308n47; hymn of, 308n47; and the south coast, 26, 229, 241–2, 263, 276, 278 Bunyan, John, 68, 265, 292 Burder, George, 80 Burgeo, 22, 36, 62, 244, 285; evangelical Anglicanism at, 264–5, 292;

Index

Methodists at, 243, 264, 266–7, 291; migration from, 175; Tractarian changes at, 265–6, 295; winter transhumance at, 266–7, 292, 295 Burgeo (Chamber’s Island). See Chamber’s Island Burke, Peter, 6, 299, 376n14 Burin, 26, 60, 191–2, 264–5, 285; commercial importance of, 228–9, 362n5; early discontinuous Anglican service at, 229, 231, 241, 261; Methodism at, 68, 178, 189, 191, 224–5, 230–1, 239– 40, 251, 261; September 1846 gale at, 231–3, 235; Tractarianism at, 206, 233–8, 261, 295; winter transhumance at, 231, 247, 367n92 Burnt Islands: Bishop Feild exhibited his sacramental vessels at, 42; Bishop Feild’s recreation at, 25; settled in 1840s, 243 Burt, John, 77 Burton, Frances, 355n83 Burton, James: teacher for Protestant Board at Harbour Buffett, 202, 223 Butler, James: advanced the founding of Harbour Buffett, 179–80, 349n9; road and relief commissioner, 202– 4; supporter of William Kepple White, 205 Butler, Joseph, 37 Butler, Samuel, 177 Butler, Victor, 179 Byron, George Gordon, 33 calico, 42–3, 270 Calvinist, 155 Cambridge, 48, 63, 152 Cambridge Camden Society, 11–12 Camden Society. See ecclesiologists Canada, 120, 130, 279–80; Oxford Movement in, 13; Gothic in, 297–8.

407

See also Binney, Hibbert; Cronyn, Benjamin; Inglis, Charles; Inglis, John; Lower North Shore; Medley, John; Mountain, George Jehoshaphat; New Brunswick; Nova Scotia; Strachan, John Canada Foreign Mission Society (cfms): 173, 176, 327n38; founded by Congregationalists in Montreal, 173; Protestant focus on evangelism of, 174 candles. See altar candles Cannadine, David, 31–2 Canterbury: St Augustine’s College at, 83, 86 Canterbury, archbishop of, 193, 269; affirmed baptismal regeneration, 44; gave recommendation to William Bowman, 338n111; said baptismal certificate not required for ordination, 152 Cape Bonavista, 98 Cape Breton: Bishop Binney’s visit to, 44; communication with western Newfoundland, 270, 272, 276–7; settlers to Newfoundland from, 276–7, 287 Cape Charles, 173; wreck of the Huntsman near, 169 Cape Freels: migrant fishers from Conception Bay at, 105 Cape La Hune, 241; south coast mission district divide at, 252–3 Cape Ray, 241, 263–4, 276 Cape St Francis, 94, 98 Cape St John: and Moreton’s Harbour mission, 127; wreck of the Wolf off, 85 Cape St Mary’s: prominent fishing ground of fishermen in Placentia Bay at, 180, 197, 233

408

Index

Carbonear, 34, 61, 75, 81, 94, 172; largest Methodist centre, 98, 150, 230, 254, 326n16; migration from, 104–5, 144, 157, 159–60, 166–8, 288– 9, 344n26 Caribou Island (Lower North Shore), 165 Carpenter, Charles C.: Congregationalist missionary on Lower North Shore, 165, 173–7, 316n37; cordial relationship with George Hutchinson at Battle Harbour of, 176; supported largely from Montreal, 173 Carter, G.B., 46 Caswall, R.C., 22–3 casuistry, 164, 213 Catalina: Bishop Feild’s preferred port to visit Bonavista from, 22; and Labrador fishery, 172; revival at, 99; sealers in port participate in revival at, 100 Cathedral of St John the Baptist, St John’s: built while the poor facing starvation, 62, 64–6, 93–4, 96, 186, 232–4; consecration of, 46, 193, 195; Bishop Feild’s vision for, 9, 62–3, 257, 322n45, 322n49; and the fire-fund controversy, 64–6, 68, 217, 294; Gothic architecture of, 11, 63–4, 73, 137, 252, 257; location problem of, 63 census: 1836, 97, 100, 334n51; 1845, 75, 97, 100, 230, 235, 256, 363n15, 363n32; 1857, 97, 105, 130, 225, 235, 238, 340n142, 363n32, 364n39, 370n16; 1869, 87, 130, 142, 145–6, 160, 236, 277, 340n142, 342n161, 363n32, 364n39; 1874, 87, 160; 1884, 97, 328n50, 345n37; 1851 UK census, 116 cfms. See Canada Foreign Mission Society

Chadwick, Owen, 3, 37 Chaleur Bay, 259–60 Chamberlain, George Seymour, 127, 141; frustrated at expansion of vernacular Methodism, 172 Chambers, Alexander: advanced founding of Harbour Buffett, 179–80, 349n9 Chambers Island, 349n9 Chance Cove, 89 Change Islands: Anglicanism at, 139– 40, 144–5; Methodism at, 86, 130, 144–5; transhumance from Conception Bay at, 86, 144, 342n158 Channel Islands. See Jersey and Guernsey Channel–Port aux Basques, 153–4, 271–5; communication with Sydney and Halifax, not St John’s, 270, 272; Sons of Temperance at, 273 Chapman, John (of Jersey Harbour), 245 Chapman, John (of Twillingate and Harbour Grace), 115–17, 128–9, 131; Bishop Feild’s view of, 78; an evangelical Anglican, 46, 78, 114, 116–17, 123, 195, 206 Chateau Bay: Bishop Feild ministered to sick Methodist woman at, 166–7; Methodists at, 166, 296; Methodists received lesson on apostolic succession at, 166 Chimmo, William: at Indian Tickle, 171 Christian Remembrancer: on Thomas E. Collett, 192; worried about Bishop Feild’s diet, 312n74 churches: at Barr’d Islands (St James’s), 146; at Battle Harbour (St James’s), 19, 165, 296, 346n50; at Birchy Cove (St Mary the Virgin), 288, 292, 296;

Index

at Brigus (St George’s), 3, 83, 86–8; at Burgeo (St John the Evangelist), 265–6; at Burin (Holy Trinity), 235; at Channel–Port aux Basques (St James’s), 273; at Forteau (St Peter’s), 154–6; at Francis Harbour (St John the Baptist), 163, 345n43; at Greenspond (St Stephen’s), 103–4; at Harbour Grace (St Paul’s), 76; at Hermitage Cove (St Saviour’s), 257– 9; at Lamaline (St Mary the Virgin), 238–9; at Salmon Cove (All Saints), 87; at St John’s (St John’s Church), 43, 52, 54–7, 63, 73, 137, 294, 323n74, (St Mary’s), 113, 258, (St Thomas’s), 5, 43, 51–2, 56, 63, 67, 69–71, 73–4, 135–6, 139, 191, 206, 218, 222, 294, 297, 319n4, 324n80; at Twillingate (St Peter’s), 117 Church, Frederic Edwin: on his way north seeking the sublime, 168, 335n71 Churchill, James, 97 churching of women, 96, 188, 353n53 church invisible, doctrine of: and Protestant ecumenism, 323n67 Church Missionary Society, 33 Church of England. See Anglicanism church polity: local church autonomy, 271. See also episcopacy church-state relations, 54–5, 210 circuit court, 16, 26, 113, 122, 312n78, 335n72 civilization (of Inuit), 169–70 Clarke, Moses Mrs, 166–7 Clarke’s Beach: Reformed Church of England at, 88–9 Clarke, William, 333n46 Clark, S.D.: frontier thesis of, 127, 131 class: and clergy, 205, 209, 217, 245; and conversion to Methodism, 127; and

409

donations to Fleming’s Cathedral, 8; escape from tedium of, 168; and lack of deference at Greenspond, 108; and public sphere, 304n5; in relation to Protestant gospel, 92 class meeting, 81, 93, 99, 120, 127, 224, 230, 240, 267, 338n104; intimacy on frontier of, 131–2, 165; on the Labrador coast, 160, 165, 167, 344n26; women leaders of, 86, 120, 132, 144, 167 Clouter, Mrs (of Bird Island Cove), 136 coal: for heating houses, 258, 363n25, 368n106; and industrialization, 34; mining at Labuan of, 334n63 Cobblers Island, 105 Cochrane, Sir Thomas: aided the Church of England, 26, 241–2, 263– 4; humbled at White Bear Bay, 244; Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge tutored children of, 339n122 Codner, Samuel: contribution to education in Newfoundland, 308n45; founder of the nss, 15, 17 Codroy: diversity at, 276; English insecurity and Anglicanism at, 276; farming at, 25 Coke, Thomas, 80 Colbourne, John: merchant at Twillingate, 114, 131, 333n46, 336n88 Colbourne, Thomas: merchant at Twillingate, 115, 131, 336n88 Coleman, Henry, 277 Coleridge, Edward: assistant master at Eton, 136; a founder of St Augustine’s College, 86 Coleridge, William Hart: and Tractarianism in the colonies, 321n42 colleges: colonial, 45, 317n48 Collett, Richard: baptism of son at St

410

Index

Thomas’s, 191; and denial of baptism, 188, 190–1, 197, 353n55 Collett, Thomas E., 185; advanced founding of Harbour Buffett, 179– 80, 349n7; evangelical Anglicanism of, 181, 183, 202, 353n55, 353n60; Church of England in Newfoundland, 205–6, 211, 238, 258–9; Church of England in Newfoundland, No. 2, 218–19, 238, 258, 360n163; and government services, 202–4; and opposition to Bishop Feild and his clergyman, William Kepple White, 5, 188–202, 205–21, 226, 357n128; refusal of Holy Communion by William Meek, 222–3; relationships with Methodists and nss of, 180–1, 184, 188–9, 222–3, 352n49; reply to H.P. Disney, 195–6, 350n10 Colley, Edward: at Hermitage Cove, 257–8, 260 Colley, Francis W.: and Labrador, 170–3 colonial bishoprics, 305n23; expansion in the colonies of, 6, 13 Colonial Bishoprics Fund: Tractarianism of, 6, 13, 306n27 Colonial Church and School Society. See Newfoundland School Society Colonial Church Bill, 71 Colonial Church Chronicle, 23, 282, 286; promotor of episcopacy in the colonies, 6; Tractarianism of, 36, 205, 210–11, 323n68; transatlantic forum for advice, 290 Colonial Office: and the 1846 fire fund, 65; Protestantism of, 59, 64 colonization, 21; ecclesiastical, xvii– xviii, 4–5, 13, 27, 35, 52. See also British Empire Comben, Charles: Methodist missionary at Channel–Port aux Basques,

273; on the Labrador coast, 159–60, 167, 172–3 Companion, Prosper: at Frenchman’s Cove, 285 Conception Bay, 15–16, 20; centre of Methodism in, 75, 81, 87, 98, 150, 295, 329n57; centre of Protestantism in, 75, 83–5, 91–2, 97, 295; and evangelical Anglicanism, 3, 37, 75–9, 88– 91, 95, 97–8, 294; and the Labrador fishery, 164, 168, 172–4, 291; migration from, 104–5, 144–5, 150, 157, 159–60, 166–7, 292, 296; and sealing, 3, 81–2, 85–6 confirmation, 17, 115, 119–20, 130, 144–5, 152–4, 180–1, 229, 235, 262, 265, 291, 311n67, 343n168; candidates too relaxed during, 103; episcopal rite, 12–13, 100, 170; evangelical focus on, 189; halted on Pinchard’s Island, 106; rebaptism at Lamaline for, 237–8; rebuffed at Red Bay, 159 Congregationalists, xvii, 92, 136, 227, 271; at Channel–Port aux Basques, 271; in Conception Bay, 80–1, 326n16; in Labrador, 165, 173–7, 296; at St John’s, 67–8, 183, 209–10; at Twillingate, 114–16, 124–5, 334n51 conversion, 78, 116; in Congregationalism, 165, 174–6, 348n80; to the Church of England, 46, 153–4, 165, 345n40; in evangelical Anglicanism, 29, 44, 56, 78, 88, 91–2, 107, 112, 182–3, 189, 250, 259, 280–1, 290; to Methodism, 91, 100, 120, 122–32, 137, 142–3, 150, 160, 172–3, 230, 240, 245, 261, 267, 291; to Roman Catholicism, 16–17, 57–8, 275, 313n2; to Tractarianism, 58

Index

Cookesley, Frederick: Anglican missionary on Lower North Shore, 175 Coomb’s Cove, 259 Cork, 152 Cornelius Island (Upper Burgeo), 243, 265; winter quarters in La Poile Bay, 266–7. See also Burgeo Cosh, R., 329n66 Coster, George, 92–3, 101; against extemporary prayer and preaching, 366n77; alarmed at news of Methodist missionary at Greenspond, 102; antipathy toward the nss, 12; appointed as archdeacon at Bonavista, 12; arranged for James Robertson to scout south coast, 242, 244, 263; explanation of increase in settlements of, 309n52 Coster, Nathaniel, 103 Coughlan, Laurence, 326n23; and first converts of Jersey, 245 Courier (St John’s): anti-Tractarian items of, 72, 206, 210, 216–18, 220, 238 courthouse, 201; church services in, 191, 229–31, 235 Court of Arches: ruling against George Cornelius Gorham, 29 Cowan, George Baring, 76, 225, 229; graphic description of winter quarters of, 325n4 Cow Head, 292 Coxe, Arthur, 49 Cox, Fanny: of Little Bay Islands, 132 Cox, William: of Fogo, 138, 140 Crabbes (St David’s): settlers at, 278–9 credit system. See merchant credit Crimean War, 346n46 Critch, Thomas, 96 Cronyn, Benjamin: evangelical bishop of Huron, 44, 317n44

411

Crowdy, James: colonial secretary, 186, 202, 212, 254–5; member of the Church Society Committee, 143; replaced as colonial secretary by John Bemister, 143 culture, 34–5, 36, 81, 98, 181, 227, 283, 294; of colonialism, 48; Irish, 7–8; oral, 172–3; print, 299; and popular agency, 5, 201 Cunningham, John: at Burgeo, 265–6, 267 Cupids, 86–7, 144; and Methodists, 87; transhumance and resettlement to Change Islands from, 86, 144 Curling. See Birchy Cove Curling, Joseph, 289, 291; a converted rich lieutenant of Royal Engineers, 288; designed and built Gothic church at Birchy Cove, 288, 292, 296; funded projects for Bishop Feild, 288 Currie, John G., 345n33 Curtis, John, 366n77 Cutwell Arm: refuge of the Hawk, 99 Dairyman’s Daughter: gospel tract, 111 Daly, Robert, 322n60 dancing: during revival, 122, 240; social, 280; on Sunday at Forteau, Sandy Point, 149, 279; at weddings, 250 Daniel, Henry, 172–3; at Little Bay Islands, 130–1 Darley, Arthur, 279 Dawe, Robert: sealing captain of the Huntsman, 169 Deck, Henry, 222, 356n110 Declaration of Independence, 312– 13n80 Deep Water Creek, 38 Deer Island, 250, 263

412

Index

degeneracy, 279; absence of, 157, 159, 169, 285–6; in missionary discourse, 15, 76, 150, 283–5; in political discourse, 325n2; questioned by Bishop Feild, 15, 134 Delby’s Cove, 376n15 democracy, 296; in the founding of Harbour Buffett, 179, 189; and Gothic Houses of Parliament, 31–2; spread through the colonies, 4, 52, 217–18, 359n157 democratic religion, 147, 161; free and independent practice in, xvii, 71, 92, 108–9, 159, 189, 271, 294; public views and debate in, 4–5, 74, 77, 127, 296 Dench (captain): wrecked in 1846 gale, 94 Devon: immigration from, 17, 83, 136, 264 Dickens, Charles, 62 Dildo: Reformed Church of England at, 89, 328n50 discourse, 363n24; empire rhetoric, 35, 47–9, 193; institutional, 4–6, 48, 56, 192–3, 196–7, 207–8, 363n24; Tractarian, 28–9, 36, 50–1, 75–7, 193. See also barren land; degeneracy; ecclesiologists; ecstasy; evangelicalism; romanticism Disney, H.P., 346n44; and the four-year transatlantic debate over payment to the Church Society, 164, 195–6, 206; at Francis Harbour, 163–4; at Harbour Grace, 195 Dissenters, 222, 255, 276; common Protestantism of, 67–8, 125; in Conception Bay, 81, 83; contributors to the 1846 fire fund, 65; donated to Bishop Medley’s cathedral, 322– 3n60; enlisted by Bishop Feild, 154;

and the formation of the sprk, 114– 16; at Moreton’s Harbour, 130; seen as a threat by Tractarians, 28, 200, 208–10, 271, 313n2; term applicable only in Britain, 54–5, 210; term applied to Methodists by Tractarians, 142, 146, 172, 183, 208, 229; Tractarian theological view of, 54–5; at Twillingate, 124, 334n51, 336n79 diversity: allowed in Anglicanism by Bishop Medley, 14; attempted suppression in Anglicanism by Bishop Feild of, 35, 300–1; at Greenspond, 103; at Red Bay, 159; on the south coast, 253–4, 271; at Twillingate, 114– 17; on the West Coast, 276–8, 292, 296 Dobie, Robert, 176–7 Dog Bay: winter transhumance at, 342n158 dogs, 48, 135, 221; attacked livestock, 16, 162; interrupted Bishop Feild’s sermons, 79, 287 Don Quixote, 149; intimations of, 27, 42–3, 151, 153, 163, 177, 301; Thomas E. Collett compared to, 217 Dorset: immigrants from, 83, 108, 115– 17, 120, 128, 157, 243–4, 276, 278–9, 285, 332n30; Slades’ servants from, 162 Downes, Martha: preacher on Sound Island, 80 Downton, Edward, 144 dress, 8, 15, 41, 43, 181; for church, 162, 260; European clothing for Inuit, 169–70; for preaching, 31, 56, 78; of women at the herring, 280 drunkenness, 280, 283; absence of, 162, 249; and clergy, 134–6, 270; in England, 10; to interrupt church services, 83; at weddings and squaring up with merchant, 249–50

Index

Duder, Edwin: Anglican merchant, 143 Duder, John C.: Methodist merchant at Twillingate, 143 Duder, Thomas C.: Methodist merchant at Fogo, 143 Duke, James: Methodist missionary at Little Bay Islands, 132 Duke of Newcastle: dispatch granting responsible government from, 217; requested to investigate status of St Thomas’s, 71; spg letter re payment to Church Society to, 219 Dundonald, Lord: entertained by Bishop Feild in Bay St George, 26, 312n78 Dunn, Andrew, 110 Dunn, Thomas, 350n21 Durrell, 121 Duval, Joshua: at Channel–Port aux Basques, 270, 272 Dyer, Robert: appeared more sociable than Julian Moreton, 107–12, 147; distributed tracts to sealers and to people leaving for winter quarters, 110–11, 316n37, 331n19; evangelical Anglican nss teacher at Greenspond, 102, 105–7, 109–13, 147, 281, 297, 358n141; occasionally wore the surplice while preaching, 113; ordained deacon, but not priest, by Bishop Feild, 112, 333n39; static in relationship with Julian Moreton, 112–13, 333n42; voted against subdivision of Protestant education grant, 112 Eastman, Robert: ardent Anglican local pilot of Bishop Feild, 28, 42; immigrant from Yeovil, 115 East, Timothy, 116

413

Ecclesiologist, 314–15n20, 315n29; attentive to Bishop Feild’s cathedral, 63–4 ecclesiologists, 18; furnished Bishop Feild with Gothic architectural advice, 11–12; determined correct Gothic church architecture, 36–7, 51, 288, 297–9, 321n42, 346n50; ruminations on Gothic in wood of, 155 ecstasy: on the Bonavista peninsula, 99–100; drew Anglicans to Methodism at Twillingate and Notre Dame Bay, 122, 125, 129, 132, 145, 147, 297; at Grates Cove, 97; the heart of Methodism, 126–7, 230, 239–40; influence on Anglican spirituality of, 97; versus transcendence and solemnity, 17, 32, 273–5, 293–4, 299 ecumenism: of Anglicans and Methodists, 17, 159, 225, 238, 245–6, 250, 261, 295; endured by Bishop Feild in close quarters, 48; Protestant, 54–5, 67–8, 92, 115–16, 124–5, 159, 171–2, 294 Eden, Robert, 21 education, 182; Church of England Academy, 183; denominational, 9, 353n50; at home, 244, 286, 374n79; and subdivision of grant, 9–10, 112, 187–8, 217, 353n50; in Sunday school, 47, 133–4, 144, 160, 253–4, 276, 338n110; Wesleyan Academy, 143; Wesleyan Training School, 183. See also Canadian Foreign Mission Society literacy, Newfoundland School Society, Presentation Sisters, Protestant Education Board egalitarianism, 4, 160, 345n37. See also democratic religion Elder, William A., 167, 335n70, 340n130; alarmed with conversions

414

Index

to Methodism on Change Islands, 145; pleased with spirituality of Change Islands, but not Fogo, 139– 41, 144, 340n132 Ellidge, George, 101, 233–4, 243 Ellis, John, 245, 251, 254 Elliston. See Bird Island Cove Ellis, William, 100 emotion. See feeling England, George Allen: on sealers, 82 England, James, 231, 350n12 Englee, 42, 137 English Harbour West, 253 Englishness, 289, 309n51; in landscape sensibilities, 34, 136; versus American, 79; versus British, 48–9, 152–3, 298; versus Irish, 63, 67, 152–3, 294; versus Scottish, 48; versus Welsh, 94, 153 “English Tom,” 171–2 enthusiasm, 33, 77, 97, 277 entire absolution. See auricular confession episcopacy: appointment of first bishop to Newfoundland, 12; appointment of Tractarian bishop, 13; first episcopal visit to Newfoundland, 12; founding in bna of, 12. See also apostolic succession; Blomfield, Charles; colonial bishoprics, Colonial Bishoprics Fund; Colonial Church Chronicle; Feild, Edward; Inglis, John; Spencer, Aubrey George Established Church. See church-state relations ethos. See under Tractarianism Eton College, 46, 136 Eucharist, 29, 281 evangelical Anglicanism: assaulted by Tractarianism, xvii, 36–7, 43, 52–3, 55–6, 78, 178–223; at Bay de Verde

and Grates Cove, 90–2; at Belleoram, 256; at Burgeo, 265; at Harbour Buffett, 181–5; in contrast to Tractarianism, 42–4, 76, 90–2, 107; at Harbour Grace, 76–8; and the nss, 101–2, 109–10, 181–5, 256; in Newfoundland, 18–19; and the Reformation, 40; at St John’s, 51–2, 69–70; at Twillingate, 116–17. See also Bible; Book of Common Prayer; ecumenism; evangelicalism; gospel; Newfoundland School Society; “Newfoundland style” architecture; pew rents; Protestantism; Reformed Church of England evangelicalism, 4, 17, 32, 67–8, 88, 92, 109–10, 114–16, 124–5, 271–2; in England, 4, 29, 33, 55, 59, 71, 116; in New Brunswick, 72–3, 306–7n31; in Nova Scotia, 317n45; in Ontario, 44; in the United States, 54–5. See also Congregationalists; evangelical Anglicanism; Record (London) evangelical press. See pamphlets; tract distribution Evans, D.D., 67 Evans, Edward, 26 Evans, John, 115–16 Evans, John (Placentia), 224, 240–1 Evans, Robert, 361n175 Exeter: Anglicans emptied pews at, 57; Anglicans mob curate at, 113; Bishop Feild at, 177; Bishop Henry Phillpotts at, 14, 56, 61, 187 Exeter School: Tractarianism, 218, 321n42 exhortation: an illustration of, 150; in Methodist class meetings, 81, 230; by Methodist missionary, 249; by Methodist sealers, 85–6; in Methodist vernacular spirituality,

Index

119–20, 131–2, 161, 173; by sailors, 175 experience. See ecstasy; feeling Exploits–Burnt Islands, 126–7, 130–1 extemporary prayer, 287, 366n77; by fishermen, 158; forbidden by Anglican hierarchy, 77, 366n77; by Methodists, 85, 119–20, 131–2, 172, 248; by women, 174 extemporary preaching, 339n124, 366n77; forbidden to lay readers by Anglican hierarchy, 77, 101, 239, 248, 366n77; by Henry Forrest, 248; John Hoskins advised by Arthur Thomey to do, 248; liked by the people, 40, 138, 339n124; by Methodists, 85, 119–20, 124, 131–2, 172; permission of granted to deacons, 112; by women, 80, 100, 131–2 Eyers, Christopher, 114, 333n46 Faulkner, William, 68 feeling: 168, 175, 248; in High Churchism, 32; in Methodism, 33, 117, 122–3, 125–6, 137, 175, 230, 239, 248; moral in Gothic architecture, 64, 103; not highly regarded in Protestantism, 137, 139–41, 175; in romanticism, 38; in Tractarianism, 33–4, 40, 86, 125–6, 141, 239, 274–5, 317n49 Feild, Edward: An Address on the System of the Church Society in Newfoundland, 212–13, An Address Read to the Congregation of St John’s, 320n19, An Address to the Congregation of St Thomas’s Church, 324n80, 324n81; high-handed arrival in Newfoundland, 50–5; institutional accomplishments of, 8–10; life in England, 10–11; and politics, 4, 9–10; rocky

415

relationship with the nss, 10, 77, 91, 112–13, 187–8, 201–2. See also Order and Uniformity; Tractarianism. See also under Basilica of John the Baptist; Battle Harbour; Bermuda; Blackman, Charles; Boland, Thomas; Bridge, Thomas Finch Hobday; British and Foreign Bible Society; Chapman, John; Collett, Thomas E.; episcopacy; Feild, Samuel; Gothic; Hamilton, Ker Baille; Harbour Buffett; Harbour Grace; Hawk, Hawkins, Ernest; Irish; Medley, John; politics; sailing; St John’s; Roberts, John; Twillingate Feild, Samuel, 329n62 Ferryland, 62, 361n175; Charles Blackman visited Placentia Bay from, 224, 241; conversion to Roman Catholicism at, 16; Peter Pering visited south coast from, 263 fighting, 16, 250, 280; example of, 16; among Roman Catholic factions, 7; at Sandy Point, 280; at weddings, 250 Finley, Gregg, 336n88; on Gothic and Englishness, 318n65; on Gothic as an aesthetic more than a theology, 298–9, 309n51; on Tractarianism and feeling, 125–6 flakes, 41, 43, 170, 227, 229; destroyed in 1846 gale, 93; and Methodist providence, 145–6; Spurrier’s, 229; women on, 119, 158; wood acquired during winter transhumance for, 111; working on Sunday on, 149 Flat Bay, 282 Flat Islands, Notre Dame Bay, 113; resettlement of Methodists to, 103–4 Flat Islands, Placentia Bay: Methodist revivalist at, 240

416

Index

Fleet, Benjamin, 231, 363n20 Fleming, Michael Anthony, 17, 240; and his cathedral, 7, 50–1, 66–7, 319n1; and ultramontanism, 6–8, 304n6 Flower’s Cove: Anglican mission headquarters moved to, 156–7 Fogo, 120, 134, 138, 147–8, 167, 300–1, 335n70, 338n110, 341n153; Methodists at, 134–5, 139, 142–3, 340n142, 341n150; picnic at, 138; Protestant Anglicans at, 135–6, 139– 42, 338n108, 340n131; Slades support Church of England at, 128–9, 338n110, 368n103 font, 53, 137, 293, 299, 308n47, 376n15; portable, 28, 42, 151, 163, 289, 300, 376n15; stone, 40, 42, 51, 61, 155, 265, 273, 316n39 Foolscap (or Cheeseman’s Rock): the Hawk high and dry on, 99, 120–1, 300–1 Foote’s Cove (on Pardy’s Island): Grand Bank fishermen revival at, 240 Forrest, Henry: extemporary preacher at Sandy Point, 248, 276 Forrest, Mary: of New York, 276 Forteau, 140, 151, 154–7; Gothic church at, 19, 155–6; Jersey fishermen at, 149–50; visit of hms Hydra and Hawk to, 156 Fortune, 240, 267; Methodism at, 242– 4, 251, 253, 260–1, 271, 284 Fortune Bay, 39, 41, 68, 191, 197, 238, 240–8, 250–7, 260–2, 276, 364n45, 368n101; west migration from, 243, 264, 267, 271–2, 291. See also Belleoram; Fortune; Grand Bank; Harbour Breton; Jersey Harbour Fox, Thomas: appointed to new

Methodist circuit at Fogo, 142; Methodist revival local preacher, 130, 132, 145, 165 Francis Harbour, 15, 19, 163–4, 346n46; first Gothic church in Labrador at, 163, 345n43 Francois, 243–4 Freer, J.B., 159 French fishery, 228–9 Frenchman’s Cove: resident from St Pierre, 285 French Revolution, 33 French settlers, 276, 277–8, 285, 296, 300; Acadians, 280 French Shore, 276, 300; Bishop Feild on, 35, 300; lack of security on, 35, 276 French, Solomon, 169 Freshwater (Conception Bay), 94 Freshwater Pond: winter quarters for Burin residents, 231 frontier freedom: in contrast to living in England, 109, 332n30; and freedom from institutional control, 176–7, 189, 276–7, 281, 287–8; in popular religion, 85, 131–4, 147, 157, 171–2, 224, 244 frontier thesis. See S.D. Clark Froude, Richard Hurrell, 10, 27–8, 159; personified the Oxford Movement, 313n83; and sailing, 32, 310n54; student of Charles Lloyd, 315–16n34 Fulford, Francis, 13, 322n49 Furby’s Cove, 242; Protestant Anglicanism of, 190 Gabriel, Alfred, 239 Gaden, Thomas E., 258; accused by William Kepple White of circulating Collett pamphlet, 254; evangelical Anglican, 245, 254; his lay marriages

Index

not recognized by Tractarians, 255, 354n67; withdrew church membership upon White’s arrival, 367n96 Gaetz, Joseph, 273–4 galleries, 100; crusade by Bishop Feild and Tractarians against, 76, 87, 102– 3, 106, 117, 146, 181, 265, 273; in Methodism, 100; at St Thomas’s, 51, 319n4, 319n5. See also “Newfoundland style” architecture Gallop, Grace, 245 Gallop, William: agent at Gaultois, 245, 276 Galpin, Joseph: at Codroy, 276 Garia: Methodists at, 267, 274, 296; resettlement from Grand Bank, 370n16 Gaspé: Bishop George J. Mountain at, 347n55 Gathercole, John Cyrus, 70, 191, 233–7, 363n19; and Gothic church, 235; and Tractarianism, 46, 234, 265–6; and women, 236, 239, 261 Gaultois, 242, 245–7, 257 Gibbons, Sarah, 155 Gifford, Algernon, 167, 170; comparatively long tenure of, 163, 165, 296; an evangelical Anglican, 154–5; at Forteau, 153, 175; not accepted as clergyman at Red Bay, 157; romantic, 156 Gilchrist, James: at Greenspond, 331n26 Gillams, 285 Gilley, Sheridan: on Tractarianism and romanticism, 33–4, 37 Gladstone, W.E., 24 Goddard, Hannah, 230 Goode, Thomas, 276–7; on enthusiasm, 277 Goodison, John: on friendly terms

417

with Lower North Shore Congregationalists, 176; organized class meetings in Labrador, 165 Goodridge, Mr: merchant agent at Sandwich Bay, 169 Gorham, George Cornelius: refused ordination, 29, 177 gospel: central in evangelical Anglicanism and Protestantism, 43–4, 53, 55, 67–9, 105, 107, 109–10, 114, 124–5, 137, 154–5, 173–4, 183; as Church, 27, 40, 68, 161, 176. See also conversion Gospel Missionary: Church of England periodical, 39, 154, 221, 273, 282 Gosse, John: Methodist chairman at Carbonear, 230 Gosse, Philip Henry: at Carbonear, 254 Gosse, Thomas, 16 Gothic, 3, 38–40, 63, 86, 150, 155, 157, 160–1, 163, 168, 185, 227, 251, 257, 259, 261, 268, 292, 296; altar, 3, 37–8, 43, 49, 51–3, 83, 273, 275, 281, 288, 297, 299; altar candles, 3, 30, 37, 49, 53, 83, 178, 193, 195, 199–200, 205, 208, 227, 297, 299, 355–6n96, 376n15; and Bishop Feild, xviii, 17– 19, 48–53, 68, 132, 137, 293–7, 300; centre aisle, 37, 51, 283, 288, 297; chancel, 37–8, 41, 43, 49, 51, 64, 87– 8, 103, 106–7, 165, 266, 273, 275, 283, 288, 297, 299; cruciform, 87–8, 235, 266, 288; east window, 3, 40, 83, 106, 147, 155, 265, 288; and Englishness, 48–9, 67; ephemeral, 42–3, 270–1; and Houses of Parliament, 31–2; in icebergs, 177; interior, 37, 297–8; lancet windows, 20, 103, 235, 265, 273, 275, 281; modified, 19; revival, 11–12, 36–7, 298, 300, 309n51, 318n65; and stone fonts, 40, 42, 51,

418

Index

53, 61, 155, 265, 273, 316n39; and Tractarianism, 11–12, 19, 30–1, 36–7, 63, 239; verticality, 87, 103–4, 165, 235, 275, 283. See also Cathedral of John the Baptist; Ecclesiologist; ecclesiologists; Gray, William; Hay, William; Medley, John; Scott, Georg Gilbert; Tractarianism Grand Bank: Methodism at, 38, 83, 237, 242–4, 247, 250–1, 260–1, 272, 284, 295; migratory Methodist fishermen from, 238, 239–40, 243–4, 253, 264, 267, 271–2, 274, 291–2, 296, 370n16 Grand Lake, 34 Grand River, 276 Grantham, Thomas: at Burin, 229–30 Grates Cove: evangelical Anglicanism at, 90–3, 95, 97; Methodism at, 92–3, 97; revivals at, 97; opposition to Bishop Feild at, 91–3, 95–6, 98, 295, 329n65; September 1846 gale at, 93– 4, 96 Great Burin: Grand Bank fishermen revival at, 237, 239–40 Great Caribou Island, 160, 162–3 Greathead, Samuel, 114 Green Bay (Notre Dame Bay), 131–2, 342n161 Greene, William: on sealers, 81–2 Green’s Harbour: Methodists at, 89: Reformed Church of England at, 328n50 Greenspond, 109–10, 115, 117–18, 140, 281, 299, 376n15; circuit court at, 113; hybrid architecture at, 19, 102– 4, 106–7; independent people at, 102–4, 107–8, 297, 331n28; nss at, 102, 107, 109–13, 281, 297, 316n37, 331n19, 333n39, 333n42, 358n141

Greenspond Island: Methodists at, 105 “Gregory the Great”, 52 Grey, Lord: colonial secretary, 28, 64–5 Grey, William, 64, 121, 177, 296; a Bishop Feild architect, 38, 266; correct Gothic church architecture of, 106, 154–6, 165; principal of Theological Institution, 103; retreated to Portugal Cove, 252; romanticism in drawings of, 38–9, 344n20, 346n50 Grimes, Thomas: resettled to Little Bay Islands, 132 Grole: drunkenness at, 249–50; Methodists at, 246–7; nss at, 46, 246–7, 256, 259, 365n66 Guernsey: wealth from Newfoundland to, 59 Guy, George, 255 Habermas, Jürgen, 304n5 Haddon, Emily (Mrs Thomas C. Duder), 143 Haddon, John, 341n152; letters to the editor on Harbour Buffett controversy, 190, 207, 209–10, 216–17, 355n96, 359–60n158; nss teacher, 179, 181–5, 201, 203, 223, 226; Protestant school inspector, 143–4, 202, 356n111 Haddon, William, 183 Haigh, John: Methodist missionary, 243 Halifax, 48, 253, 308n47; Bishop Inglis’s visitation from, 12, 115; Newfoundland and western shore and west coast the hinterland of, 159, 270–4, 280; Tractarian and evangelical battle at, 317n45 Hall, Frederic G.: at Crabbes, 278; on Thomas Boland, 282

Index

Hall, Mr (an agent): Halifax merchant, 253–4 Hamilton (Bermuda): cathedral at, 288 Hamilton Inlet, 171 Hamilton, Ker Baille: dispute with Archdeacon Bridge and Bishop Feild of, 71, 205, 211–17, 220, 332n37; evangelicalism of, 72, 112, 358n141; pamphlet by, 214–15; on Responsible Government, 217–18, 359n157; and St Thomas’s, 70–1 Hamilton, Richard: naval captain, 156, 160 Hampshire (England): immigrants from, 108–9, 184 Hampton (New Brunswick), 14 Handcock, W. Gordon: on the nss, 308n45; on settlement, 102 Hann, Thomas: in evangelical Anglican and Methodist ecumenism, 180; on government boards at Harbour Buffett, 203–5 Harbour Beaufette Society: to build a church and school, 179 Harbour Breton, 115, 229, 257, 264, 268; early Anglicanism at, 242, 245– 6, 365n61; Methodism at, 243, 245– 6, 260, 278; Protestantism at, 244–6; Tractarianism at, 190, 221, 250–3, 255, 260, 273, 295. See also Gaden, Thomas E.; Mountain, Jacob George; Newman, Hunt, and Co.; White, William Kepple Harbour Buffett, 47, 234, 254, 299, 349n2, 349n9, 356n107, 356n111; evangelical Anglicanism at, 180–5, 189–90, 199, 205–6, 218–19, 223; founding of, 178–80; Methodism at, 179–81, 183–4, 189, 225; nss at, 90, 181–4, 201, 223, 352n49, 361n175;

419

opposition to Bishop Feild at, 5–6, 19, 186–9, 190–202, 205–11, 254, 258, 295, 355–6n96. See also altar candles; auricular confession; baptism Harbour Grace, 60, 80–81, 93, 163–4, 195, 206, 254, 258, 307n32; evangelical Anglicanism at, 5, 19, 74–9, 117, 297; opposition to Bishop Feild at, 61, 76–9, 97–8, 294, 352–3n49 Harbour Le Cou: Methodists from Grand Bank to, 267, 370n16 Harding, John, 107 Harding, William: immigrant to Placentia Bay, 115 Hardy, John: lay reader at Richard’s Harbour, 244 Harrington Harbour: resettlement from Newfoundland to, 175 Harris, George, 277 Harris, John: early Anglican clergyman at Placentia and south coast, 237, 240–1; impressed with Anglicans of Harbour Grace, 307n32; at St John’s, 290, 364n45 Harris, Thomas: at Twillingate, 121, 125, 142 Hart’s Cove, 120–2 Harvard, 22 Harvey, George, 264 Harvey, James C., 151, 191; to England to treat failing eyesight, 88; evangelical Anglican, 88; at Fogo, 134, 144, 146, 340n131; at Port de Grave, 88–9 Harvey, Sir John, 320–1n31; and the ncs, 58–9, 61, 233: patron of Bible Society, 67; transferred to Nova Scotia, 233 Haslegrave, Joseph: administrator of the nss, 91 Hawk, 20–7, 46, 59, 67, 99, 120–1, 136,

420

Index

145, 150, 157–60, 235, 238, 250, 265– 6, 269–71, 290, 300–1; Bishop Feild’s cloister, 22, 62; in consort with the Royal Navy, 26, 156, 160; proper internal church arrangements on, 42, 133, 145, 151, 166, 225; in September 1846 gale, 64–5, 95 Hawkins, Ernest, 13, 16, 21, 45, 72, 138, 162, 164, 222, 272; Feild’s correspondence venting to, 94, 142, 151–3, 170, 188, 252, 268–70; letters re ncs payment of, 198, 219–20 Haystack: Methodists at, 184, 226 Hay, William: a Bishop Feild architect, 235, 239 Headon, Christopher Fergus, 13, 327n34, 328n49, 347n55 Heart’s Content: Henry Lind at, 282; and telegraph cable to, 30, 177 heathenism. See degeneracy Henley Harbour, 149, 163, 166–7, 173; Methodists at, 166, 173, 296; violence at, 166 Henley Island, 38 Henry, Matthew, 114 Hermitage Bay, 42, 190, 241–52, 262 Hermitage Cove, 242, 368n105, 376n15; Edward Colley at, 257–8, 260; Thomas Newman Hunt’s church at, 39–40, 255, 257–9, 261, 368n103; Methodists at, 243, 246–9, 260, 264, 295; nss at, 256, 259 herring fishery: on the west coast, 204, 280, 289, 291 Herring Neck: resettlement from, 130, 296 Hicks, Jeremiah, 333n46 Hickson, James: in Bonavista revival, 100 Hicks, Thomas, 333n46

High Church. See under Anglicanism Hill, George W., 317n45 Hillyard, John: Congregationalist missionary, 80–1, 114–15 history: institutional, 4–10, 18; political, 4–5, 7, 9–10, 28–9, 305n19, 306n31, 313n2, 325n2, 332n38, 341n152, 353n50; popular, xviii, 3–6, 8, 304n7, 308–9n49; religion in, 34– 5, 81, 179, 201; transhumance in, 310n53. See also popular agency; population mobility Hobsbawm, Eric: and invented tradition, 31 holiness: Protestant, 84, 91, 106–7, 114, 137, 176, 243, 256; Tractarian, in Gothic space and material objects, 36–7, 42, 55, 76, 86–7, 106–7, 151, 316n39, and in ritual and liturgy, 52–3, 68–9, 151, 253. See also ethos under Tractarianism Hollett, John Jr (of Sound Island), 224 Hollett, John (of Harbour Buffett), 199 Hollett, John Sr (of Sound Island), 224–5 Holmes, John: of Seldom, 86, 144–5 Holy Communion. See Real Presence under Tractarianism Holy Spirit, 55, 81, 106, 277; in Methodism, 125–7, 240; people as a temple of, 36, 42, 84, 115, 137; in regeneration at baptism, 44, 176; in regeneration at conversion, 107, 169, 174 Hooper, George, 236–7, 270 Hope Simpson, Sir John: at Harbour Buffett, 227 Hopkins, John Henry: on Tractarianism, 54 Hoskins, John: at Old Perlican, 80, 248

Index

Hoskins, John Jr: at Grates Cove, 92–3 Hoyles, H.W., 71, 200, 206, 216, 219; denigrated Feild’s opposition in Harbour Buffett, 191, 194, 208–12; protested against John Haddon’s appointment as school inspector, 183 Hoyles, W.J.: at Fogo, 135–6, 151 Hubbard, Charles F.: clergyman of the Reformed Church of England, 327n41 Hugo, Victor: on Tractarianism, 315n25 Humber River: Bishop Feild overtaken with the scenery of, 286; Ralph Brake at, 285 Humber Sound, 286 Hunt, Thomas Newman: and his stone Gothic church, 255, 257–8, 261, 368n103 Huron (Western Ontario): evangelical bishop at, 44, 46 hurricane, 1846. See September gale, of 1846 Hutchinson, George, 170, 176–7, 269, 287; at Battle Harbour, 163–9; cordial with Congregationalists, 165–6, 176; nephew of William Wordsworth, 164; romanticism of, 165, 168–9, 296 hymns, 138, 150, 158, 264; of William Bullock, 308n47; Methodist, 82, 273; Moravian, 170; Tractarian, 32; of Isaac Watts, 115 immigrants: at Bay of Islands, 285–7; at Bonne Bay, 290–1; at Codroy, 276; at Crabbes, 278; at Fortune Bay, 244; at Placentia Bay, 115, 183–4; at Port aux Basques, 275; at Richard’s Harbour, 244; at Sandy Point, 276; at Twill-

421

ingate, 114–15; women workers at Forteau, 149. See also under Newman, Hunt and Co. independence. See frontier freedom Independent. See Congregationalist Indian Islands, 144 Indian meal, 62, 96, 186, 190, 203–4, 235 Indian Tickle, 171 Indoe, Henry J.: on Methodism in Seldom, 145–6 Industrialization: and romanticism, 30, 33–4, 40 Inglis, Charles: first bna bishop, 12 Inglis, John, 250, 338n110; concluded Methodists had taken Brigus, 79, 81, 83; struck by diversity of views at Greenspond and Twillingate, 103, 115; visit to Newfoundland of, 12, 26; went west only as far as Burin, 229, 241 Ingram, George: refusal of baptism to, 190, 196, 207, 209–10, 219 invented tradition, 31–2 Ireland, 269, 322–3n60; donation to famine victims in, 65; H.P. Disney from, 163; Newfoundland merchants from, 59; Oxford dons upset over status of church in, 28; revival at, 123; stone for Bishop Spencer’s cathedral from, 63; transatlantic cable from, 30 Ireland’s Eye, 15, 376n15 Irish, 276, 278, 294, 296; Bishop Feild’s view of, 48, 67, 137, 152–3, 163; culture, 6–8 Irish Church Temporalities Bill: and beginning of Tractarianism, 28 iron: Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge as, 58; and Industrial Revolution, 34, 289; Bishop Feild as, 35, 46;

422

Index

metaphorical use of, 34, 46, 220, 314n20 Isle aux Morts, 277; George Harvey at, 264 Isle Valen, 221, 225, 352n44; schools at, 201, 223; Spurrier at, 362n5 Islington (in Greater London): evangelical Anglicans battle Tractarians at, 56, 192, 354n78 Jacob (of Swain’s Island), 107, 147 Jamaica: Bishop Spencer transferred to, 56, 231 Janeway, James, 114 Jarvis, Robert: of John de Bay, 248 Jeans, Samuel, 114, 333n46 Jersey: donation by Miss Lempriere from, 288; emigration from, 175, 278, 296; and Wellmein W. Le Gallais, 273; and Methodism, 245, 270; and Newfoundland and Labrador fishery, 59, 149–50, 162, 167, 245, 270, 280, 343n1; and John Paine, 375n88 Jersey Harbour: Nicolle’s firm at, 243– 6, 270 Jeynes, William, 180–2, 183–5, 190, 260; departed shortly after Feild’s arrival, 46, 185; first missionary to Harbour Buffett, 180, 251–2; a hardening of relationship with Methodists of, 225; superintendent of nss, 184 Joe Batt’s Arm, 5, 146–7 John de Bay, 248 John’s Beach, 288 Johnson, Mr (of McIver’s), 287 Johnson, Mrs (of Greenspond), 110 Johnson, Reginald Malcolm: Anglican clergyman at Fogo, 140–4, 167, 341n153 Jones, Frederick, 11, 235; agreed Bishop

Feild was a wedge in Newfoundland society, 306n31; an apologist for Bishop Feild, 65, 90, 201, 215–16; determined Bishop Feild had nearly eliminated evangelicals, 18; focus on politics of, 9–10; institutional biography of Bishop Feild of, 5, 9–10, 305n16, 312n75; judged T.F.H. Bridge as opportunistic, 58; and Tractarianism, 45 Jones, John, 114 Jones, Thomas: principal of the Theological Institution, 43, 45 joy. See ecstasy Jukes, Joseph Beete, 34 justification by faith, 44, 78, 91, 107, 135 Keble, John, 27–8, 32; poetry of, 33–4, 141, 165, 275; supported Colonial Bishoprics Fund from Christian Year sales, 306n27 Keels, 100 Kelly, James B.: coadjutor bishop, 44, 137, 141, 145, 170, 173, 345n43, 372n49 King, James, 96 King, Mrs (of Fortune), 240–1 Kingsbury, William, 114 King’s Cove, 100–1 Kingwell, John Jr: Anglican clergyman, 130, 337n95 Kingwell, John Sr: nss teacher, 77, 337n95 Kirby, Edith: was refused Holy Communion, 194, 196–9, 207–8 Kirby, Mary, 192 Kirby, Samuel, 191–2, 194, 196–7, 207– 9 kitchen Anglicanism. See under Anglicanism

Index

Knight, Henry, 99 Knight, Richard, missionary at Grand Bank, 243, 245 Labrador fishery: nursery for Methodism, 150, 172. See also lay evangelism Labuan: Julian Moreton transferred to, 117, 334n63 Ladner, Charles, 273–4 Lally Cove, 256 Lamaline, 228, 235; Tractarianism at, 19, 237–9, 261, 316n42; rebaptism at, 206, 234, 237–8, 313n6 landscape: beautiful, 20, 24–5, 38, 41, 133, 163, 257, 286, 298. See also barren land La Poile, 26–7, 263–4, 266–73; Thomas Appleby at, 268, 295–6; W. Wellmein Le Gallais converted at, 273; resettlement to Harrington Harbour from, 175; too distant to administrate effectively, 269–70, 272; transhumance from Upper Burgeo to, 266–7, 292 Lark Harbour, 293; summer fishery at, 286 latitudinarianism, 308n48 Lawlor, Stephen, 138, 339n125 Lawn, 242, 264 lay evangelism: on the Bonavista Peninsula, 99–100; in Bonne Bay, 291; of Grand Bank fishermen, 139– 40, 243–4, 267; on the Labrador coast, 150, 160, 172–3, 175; in Notre Dame Bay, 127–8, 142–3, 147, 172–3; in Placentia Bay, 240; of sealers, 100, 105, 110–11; in winter quarters, 142, 160, 345n37 lay readers, 41, 47, 89, 102, 110, 127, 133–4, 144–5, 158, 162, 169, 171–2, 224, 229, 248, 250, 252, 263–4, 270, 276–7, 290–1, 299, 313n6, 366n77;

423

Methodist, 80, 92–3, 120, 124, 157, 166, 248, 277; nss teachers as, 17, 77, 101, 107, 182–3, 187, 226, 246–8, 256; women as, 176, 244 Leading Tickles, 99, 120; vernacular Anglicanism at, 133–4 Leeds: E.B. Pusey funded church at, 185; revival at, 259; William Kepple White worked in post office at, 185 Lee, Mr (of Bonne Bay), 260 Le Gallais, Wellmein W., 291, 370n16; ardent, 139, 274–7, 287, 292, 296, 372n49; Tractarian, 104, 273–6, 281, 283, 288, 292, 296 Legge, Thomas: at Crabbes Barachoix, 278–9 Leigh (Essex), 21 Leigh, John: first Anglican clergyman at Twillingate, 131 Le Marchant, Sir John Gaspard: and Church Society, 196, 233; anti-Tractarian, 194; Royal Instructions to, 358n144 Lempriere, Miss (of Jersey): donation to Bay of Islands mission of, 288 Lench, Charles: on Methodism in Brigus, 80 Le Seur, Pierre: a Laurence Coughlan convert, 245 Lewis, John: first Methodism missionary at Burin and Placentia Bay, 184, 224, 229–30 Lewis, Stephen, 96 Lichfield, 281–2 Lighthouse Island (Simms Island): Fogo picnic at, 138 Lind, Henry, 16; evangelical Anglican, 282–3, 296 literacy: and class, 108, 196–7; lack of, 65, 105, 196–7, 209, 259–60; of nss

424

Index

students, 111, 316n37; and oral culture, 172 Little Bay Islands, 130–2, 147 Little Harbour Deep, 15, 298 Liverpool: evangelical Bishop John C. Ryle at, 176; Newfoundlanders with leverage from people at, 72, 222; transatlantic newspapers from, 63, 163–4, 346n46 Lloyd, Charles: High Church bishop and lecturer at Oxford, 10, 40, 315– 16n34 lms. See London Missionary Society Lobster Cove, 294 London, 18, 56, 63–5, 107, 115–16, 152, 176, 192, 274, 305–6n23; Bishop Blomfield at, 11–2; Colonial Church Chronicle at, 6; Colonial Office at, 64; lms at, 68; nss at, 222; Record at, 46; spg at, 12; wmms at, 232 London Missionary Society, 80, 333n42; focus on the gospel, not church government, 68, 125; at Twillingate, 114 London Tract Society, 274 Long Island, Notre Dame Bay, 300. See also Ward’s Harbour Long Island, Placentia Bay. See Harbour Buffett; Haystack; Spencer’s Cove Louisbourg, 44 Low Church. See under Anglicanism Lowell, Robert Traill Spence: Bishop Feild’s opinion of, 48, 79; collected from Boston for the poor in Newfoundland, 94; wrote scathing poem on building elaborate churches while bypassing poor, 94 Lower Island Cove, 92 Lower North Shore: Bishop of Quebec a mission on, 175; communication

along, 165–6; Congregationalist mission on, 173–7; migratory fishermen at, 154, 316n37; resettlement from Newfoundland to, 175; settlers on, 332n30, 348n80 Lucas, John G.: sub-collector at Fogo, 143, 341n150 Macfarlane, Margaret: Congregationalist missionary on Lower North Shore, 176–7, 349n85 MacNeill, Warren: Halifax merchant at Channel–Port aux Basques, 271 Magdalen Islands: migratory fishermen of, 175 Manchester, 276–7 Manuel, William, 114, 333n46 margin. See frontier Marnhull, 276 marriage: lay, 246, 255, 290–1, 354n67; and proselytism, 16–17, 162, 225, 345n40 Marseille, 32 Marshall, John: at Belleoram, 112, 256– 8, 261; at Grole, 46, 246–7, 365n66; at Hermitage, 249, 258; hospitality to Bishop Feild and Sophia of, 368n101; nss teacher and deacon, 112, 258 Marshall, William, 128–9, 245–50, 264– 5, 271 Martine, John Melville, 48, 79, 83 Massachusetts, 173–4 Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 174 Masters, Samuel, 197; affidavit of, 207, 353n60; child of refused baptism until promised to pay Church Society, 188–9, 191; children of baptized by Methodist missionary, 189; condemned by the church hierarchy, 209; to Fortune Bay to fish, 191

Index

Maynooth, 269 McCarty, Mr & Mrs, 52 McCrea, R.B.: on Bishop Feild’s cathedral, 63–4; on state of evangelical Anglicanism, 18 McIver’s, 287; settler from Burin at, 285 McKays. See Middle Barachoix McLean, Duncan, 282 McLintock, A.H.: on degeneracy and political rescue, 325n2 Meadows, 288 Medley, Charles, 287 Medley, John, 47, 298, 311n67, 326n26, 340n139; assessment of Bishop Feild by, 14; contra uniformity, 14–15; did not refuse baptism for non-payment of church dues, 359n147; and Gothic, 309n51, 315n29, 318n65, 321n42; and his cathedral, 321n42, 322n49, 340n139; opinion of Michael Anthony Fleming’s cathedral of, 319n1; support for nss of, 328n54; Tractarian, 13–15, 43–4, 140–1, 306n27, 306– 7n31, 315–16n34, 319n14, 321n42, 322–3n60 Meek, Christopher, 142 Meek, William, 46, 279–81, 283–4, 296 Meek, William Frederick, 179, 222–3 Merasheen, 17, 24, merchant credit, 16, 229; none when needed most, 93, 186, 232–3; used for Church of England leverage, 128 Merchantman Harbour, 165 merchants: large profits of, 59, 171, 229 Merriot, W.J., 18–19 Messervey, Mr (of Sandy Point), 276 Methodism. See under apostolic succession; Thomas Boone; Brigus; Burin; Change Islands; Channel–Port aux Basques; Conception Bay; conver-

425

sion; ecstasy; Fortune; Grand Bank; Grates Cove; Harbour Breton; Harbour Buffett; Henley Harbour; Holy Spirit; Labrador fishery; Notre Dame Bay; Petites; Red Bay; revivals; St John’s; Sound Island; Twillingate Methodist Magazine, 54, 119, 230, 259 Middle Barachoix (McKays), 283, 374n67 Middle Bill Cove, 105 migratory fisheries – Labrador fishery: at Battle Harbour, 160–2; from Bonavista and Catalina, 172; to Bonne Esperance, 154; from Brigus, 172; from Carbonear to Battle Harbour, 168; from Carbonear to Chateau Bay, 166–7; from Carbonear to Henley Harbour, 167; from Conception Bay and Trinity Bay, 150; from Newfoundland to the Lower North Shore, 175; from northeast coast, 348n77; from Notre Dame Bay, 172 – northeast coast fishery: from Brigus to Change Islands and Seldom, 86; from Cupids to Change Islands, 144; from Spaniard’s Bay to Cape Freels, 105 – sealing fishery: to Catalina en route to, 100; from Conception Bay, 81–6; from Greenspond, 110, 316n37; to Pool’s Island from Conception Bay, 105 – south coast fishery: from Burin to Cape St Mary’s, 233; from Grand Bank and Fortune to Burgeo, 243, 264, 267; from Grand Bank and Fortune to Channel–Port aux Basques, 243, 264; from Grand Bank and Fortune to Petites, 243, 267; from Grand Bank to Burin, 239–40; from Grand

426

Index

Bank to Lamaline, 238; from Harbour Buffett to Fortune Bay, 191 – west coast fishery: at Bonne Bay; at Sandy Point, 276–7, 279–80 Mi’kmaq, 276–7, 280, 285, 287 Miles, James, 244 Milton Abbas, 278 M’Ilvaine, Charles P., 313n5 miracles: appearance of cathedrals in icebergs, 163; arrival of sister, 110; dry Prayer Book, 111–12; visions of Jesus, 106, 165 Miss B. (of Burin), 236 Mission Field, 285 mobility. See population mobility Montreal, 13, 173, 176, 322n49 Moore, Lilias (Lilias Kingwell), 130 Moors, John, 114, 333n46 Moors, Lydia, 114 moral rescue. See degeneracy Moran, Francis, 236 Moravians, 115, 155, 169–70, 310n58 Moreton, Julian, 117–18, 140, 281, 290, 331n21, 331n28, 334n63; friction with Robert Dyer and the nss, 112– 13; popular opposition to Tractarianism of, 103–9, 147 Moreton’s Harbour, 115, 127, 129–30 Mortier Bay, 231 Mosquito, 250 Mountain, Armine, 156 Mountain, George Jehoshaphat, 156, 175, 309–10n52, 347n55 Mountain, Jacob George, 46–7, 139, 153, 163, 181, 221, 269, 282, 327n42, 354n67; popular opposition to, 190, 252–3, 255; romanticism of, 38; Tractarianism of, 190, 252–6, 260–1, 273, 365–6n69 Muddy Hole, 249–50

Mullock, John Thomas, 16 Munden, Azariah, 82 Munden, Joseph, 336n88 Munden, William, 82 Musgrave Harbour, 130–1 music, 120, 131, 143, 245, 254, 280, 288 Napoleonic Wars, 102, 228–9, 261 National Schools, 10, 269 ncs. See Newfoundland Church Society New Bonaventure, 376n15 New Brunswick. See Hampton; Medley, John; Saint John Newburyport, ma, 173 New England, 12, 94, 159, 175, 270 Newfoundland Church Society, 117, 186–222, 231, 236, 282; annual fee of, 9, 58–62, 118, 186, 188–91, 195, 197–9, 205, 213, 217, 219–21, 233, 235, 261, 268, 283; committee of, 64, 207–11, 215, 234; refusals to pay to, 73, 96–7, 112, 188–91, 197–9, 201, 216, 221–2, 226. See also Bridge, Thomas Finch Hobday; Collett, Thomas E.; Feild, Edward; Hamilton, K.B.; Hoyles, H.W.; Robinson, Bryan; White, William Kepple Newfoundlander, 359n157 Newfoundland Express, 106 Newfoundland Royal Commission 1933 Report, 325n2 Newfoundland School Society. See under Belleoram; Codner, Samuel; Dyer, Robert; Feild, Edward; evangelical Anglicanism; Greenspond; Grole; Haddon, John; lay readers; literacy; Marshall, John; Spencer, Aubrey George; tract distribution, Woody Island

Index

“Newfoundland style” architecture, 20, 37, 102–3, 117, 146, 181, 273, 340n131 New Harbour, 89, 328n50 New Harbour (South Coast), 38, 47 Newman, Hunt and Co., 265; Anglican church at Harbour Breton under auspices of, 242, 245, 251, 254; hegemony at Harbour Breton of, 242, 254–5, 367n95; immigrant workers at, 247, 252, 261. See also Thomas Newman Hunt Newman, John Henry, 27–8, 32–3, 45, 275, 313n2, 315–16n34, 317n49 Newman, Martha, 116 Newman, Mrs (of Twillingate), 123–4 Newman, Richard, 109, 115–16 New York, 49, 72–3, 276, 290, 315n28 Nicolle & Co., 245, 273 Nicolle, J.M., 270 Nippers Harbour, 47, 128, 133 Noad, Joseph, 68 Noall, Simeon, 243, 249 Noble, Louis Legrand, 168, 335n71 Nockles, Peter, 3, 32–3, 37, 45, 317n49 Nonconformists. See Dissenters Normandy, 276 Norman’s Cove, 89 Norris, James, 344n26 northeast coast, 64, 99–148, 230, 241, 309n52, 359n157; evangelical Anglicans largely ignored Bishop Feild’s instructions on, 19; George Coster’s explanation of spread of settlement on, 309n52; in Labrador fishery, 172; resettlement from Conception Bay to, 7; resettlement to Bonne Bay via Labrador fishery from, 291; spread of Methodism to Labrador from, 172–3; traded with St John’s, 20, 161.

427

See also Barr’d Islands, Change Islands, Fogo, Little Bay Islands, Seldom, Twillingate, Ward’s Harbour North River, 88–9 Notre Dame Bay: evangelical Anglicans ignored Bishop Feild’s instructions in, 146–7; immense growth of Methodism in, 113, 127–32, 291, 296–7; resettlement from Conception Bay in, 86; spread of Methodism to Labrador from, 172–3. See also Barr’d Islands; Change Islands; Fogo; Little Bay Islands; Seldom; Twillingate; Ward’s Harbour Nova Scotia, 236, 268, 317n48; Baptists of, 155, 253, 271, 297, 334n51; Hibbert Binney of, 44, 112; communication and trade with the western shore and west coast of, 159, 270–4, 280; first bishop in British North America of, 12; fishermen in Bonne Bay from, 291; Gothic in, 297; Governor John Harvey transferred to, 233; immigrants to Newfoundland from, 276, 287, 296; migratory fishermen on the Lower North Shore from, 175; planned migration from Forteau to, 154; James Robertson’s south coast report given to bishop of, 242; rumour of Bishop Feild moving to, 189; visit of Bishop John Inglis from, 229, 241. See also Cape Breton; Halifax; Sydney nss. See Newfoundland School Society Nurse, James, 277 Oak, William, 144 Oderin, 181, 186, 201, 362n5 Old Bonaventure, 376n15 Old Perlican, 80, 92, 96, 248

428

Index

Old Testament: chancel and Holy of Holies in, 36, 85, 106–7, 109; Tractarians as priests in, xvii, 4, 37, 41, 85, 253, 297; and Victor Hugo’s judgment of Tractarianism, 315n25. See also altar under Gothic “Omega” (pseudonym), 183, 199, 207, 355n96 Order and Uniformity, 14, 162; clergyman strayed from, 287; Bishop Feild’s first charge to his clergy, 34– 6; impossible on the frontier, 133, 287, 290–1, 300; the introduction of Tractarianism to Newfoundland and Labrador in, 34–6, 52–3, 73, 218–19; large impact on culture both in reaction to and compliance with, 34; opposition to, 19, 52, 54, 74, 92, 118, 135–6, 146–7, 185, 218–19, 294–7; those not in agreement with discredited, 48, 76–7 Oriel College, 3–4, 10, 45, 310n54, 317n49 Osmond, Joseph, 294, 313–14n6 Oxford: Thomas Finch Hobday Bridge a graduate of, 57; Bishop Feild a graduate of, 10; fountain of Tractarianism, 3–4, 26, 48–9, 73, 90; Richard Hurrell Froude at, 310n54; Thomas Jones a graduate of, 45; Charles Lloyd at, 10, 40; Jacob George Mountain a graduate of, 46, 252; Edward Pusey at, 29, 195. See also Oriel College Oxford Movement. See Tractarianism Pack, Stephen Olive, 238 Paine, John, 41, 290–2, 375n88 Paine, Thomas: rationalism of, 33 Palairet, Charles, 20 Palermo, 32

pamphlets: primary form of nineteenth-century print media, 6, 18, 71, 91–2, 188–9, 198, 205–7, 238, 254, 360n163. See also Bridge, Thomas Finch Hobday; Collett, Thomas E.; Feild, Edward; Hamilton, Ker Baille; Roberts, John; White, William Kepple Paris, 15, 149–50 Park, Mr (of McIver’s), 285 Parochial Missionary Magazine, 285 Parsons, Henry, 94 Parsons, Robert John, 187, 217–18, 360n166; and responsible government, 217–18 Pass Island, 42 Patriot: against appropriation of fire funds for Anglican cathedral, 65; sided with Bishop Feild against Thomas E. Collett and Ker Baille Hamilton, 217, 350n157, 360n166; transatlantic copy of Hoyles and Robinson opinion in, 210; transatlantic Tractarian copy in, 29, 53, 187, 195 “Paul Pry” (pseudonym), 355–6n96 Peach, John S., 68, 370n16; baptized children for Anglicans, 189, 191; despaired over lack of Methodist strategy on south coast, 271–2; dim view of Fogo of, 142; disappointment on the south coast of, 245–7; distressed by drunkenness, 249–50; success at Twillingate of, 118 Pearce, Andrew, 116 Penguin Islands, 242 Penny, Henry, 144–5 Pepys, Henry, 31, 55–6 Percey, John, 79–82 Pereiro, James, 3, 37, 313n83, 354n78; on High Church spirituality, 32–2;

Index

on Tractarianism and antiquity, 40; on Tractarianism and ethos, 45, 317n49 Pering, Peter, 263 Petites, 243, 267, 272–4, 296, 370n16 Petty Harbour, 17, 34, 38, 184, 316n39 pew rents: cancellation of shifted power to bishop, 60; at Fogo, 140, 142; at Harbour Buffett, 188; at Harbour Grace, 78; replaced by Church Society fee, 60–1; several churches refused to cancel, 60, 78, 117, 142, 188, 360n170; at St Thomas’s (St John’s), 360n170; at Twillingate, 115, 117–18, 334–5n64 Peyton, John Jr, 116, 128–9 Phelps, Joseph Francis, 269 Phillpotts, Henry, 14, 56, 177, 187 Phinney, John S., 240 Piccaire, 242 Pickavant, John, 251 Pike, John, 240 Pilgrim’s Progress, 68, 265, 292 Pinchard’s Island, 147, 299, 331n21; opposition to Bishop Feild at, 105–6 Pinware, 168 Piper’s Hole, 361n180 Placentia: Board of Education at, 179– 80, 201, 349n7; conversion to Roman Catholicism at, 16; early Anglican clergyman at, 224, 240, 290, 364n45 Placentia Bay, 24, 248, 251, 254, 355– 6n96; annual fall visit of Methodism missionary from Burin to, 189, 224; Charles Blackman’s visit to, 241; conversion to Roman Catholicism in, 17; ecumenical evangelical Anglicans and Methodists in, 224; Bishop Feild’s first clergyman to, 5–6, 185– 6, 227, 295; four nss schools estab-

429

lished in, 90; immigration to, 115; Bishop John Inglis’s visit to, 241; lack of schools in, 202; Methodists in inner, 184, 225, 240; poverty in the late 1840s in, 62; resettlement in, 178–9; Bishop Spencer’s foray to inner, 224–6, 330n10; Spurriers in, 229; Wix’s winter visit to, 224. See also Burin; Harbour Buffett; Isle Valen; Placentia; Sound Island planters, 60, 130, 132–4, 154, 266–7, 272, 336n88, 342n158 poetry, 33–4, 49, 87, 94, 136, 141, 165, 185 Polden, T.B., 259, 365n66 Poole, 244; merchants of, 115, 128–9, 134, 162, 229, 362n5; Protestant diversity at, 116; St James’s Church at, 117, 146 Pool’s Island, 105, 110, 331n19 poor. See poverty popular agency, 4–5, 93, 301, 304n7. See also Bartlett, Abram; Deer Island, “English Tom”; Hart’s Cove, Leading Tickles; Paine, John; Petites; Salvage; Ward’s Harbour. See also under Brigus, Grand Bank, Greenspond, Harbour Grace, Pinchard’s Island, Red Bay, St Thomas’s popular history. See under history popular religion. See class meeting; extemporary prayer; extemporary preaching; lay evangelism; lay readers; Sunday observance. See also under baptism; Irish; marriage; women population mobility: See migratory fisheries; resettlement; winter transhumance Port de Grave, 46, 80, 88–9, 233, 352– 3n49

430

Index

Porter, Mr (of Change Islands), 342n158 Portugal Cove, 38, 252, 348n77, 366n77 positivism, 38 potato blight, 186, 232–3 Pouch Cove, 316n39 poverty, 290, 331n28; and Church Society payment, 96–7, 186–219, 261; during Bishop Fleming’s project, 8; and the 1846 fire funds, 64–5, 68; in England, 10; exacerbated by 1846 gale, 93–4; of the late 1840s, 62, 138, 232–5; and poor relief, 65, 128, 186, 190, 204, 232, 235, 294; secondary to church, 42. See also Indian meal prayer. See extemporary prayer preaching. See extemporary preaching Prendergast, Stephen: refused sacraments because Church Society not paid, 96 Presbyterians: also built in Gothic, 297; in ecumenical Protestantism, 67–8, 92, 125; editor of the Patriot; at Indian Tickle, 171; proximity to caused Bishop Feild discomfort, 48; sought a clergyman in the Bay of Islands from Bishop Feild, 287, 289; at Twillingate, 115 Presentation Sisters, 7 Prince Edward Island, 112, 280 Privy Council, 29 Protestant Education Board, 143, 179– 80, 201–2, 222–3, 254, 349n7, 350n16, 356n111 Protestantism: pulpit in, 31, 37, 43, 51, 76, 87, 102–4, 117, 146, 181, 273, 308n47, 330n10, 340n131. See also under apostolic succession; Bible; British and Foreign Bible Society; church invisible; Collett, Thomas E.; Conception Bay; Congregationalists;

conversion; ecumenism; evangelical Anglicanism; evangelicalism; gospel; Harbour Breton; holiness; “Newfoundland Style” architecture; Poole; Roberts, John Provincial Wesleyan, 172 Prowse, Daniel Woodley, 18, 215, 258, 308n49, 320n26 Prowse, Robert, 18, 68, 328–9n56 Pryor, David: was refused sacraments because he did not pay Church Society, 96 Public Ledger (St John’s), 232, 238; antiTractarian transatlantic items of, 53, 55–7, 187; articulated a Protestant ecumenism, 125; and the Collett pamphlet, 206–7, 209–10; editor of upset over Bishop Feild’s use of fire funds, 65; report of church dispute in Fogo, 135; report of church dispute in Harbour Buffett, 183, 199; report of rebaptism in Lamaline, 238 public sphere, 4, 304n5 Pugin, Augustus Welby N., 31, 314n11 Purcell, James, 48, 321n44 Puritanism, 88, 175, 295, 312–13n80 Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 27, 32, 176; advocated auricular confession, 29, 187, 195; alarmed Protestants in transatlantic press, 53–4, 119; Bishop Feild identified with, 186–7; funded Gothic St Saviour’s Church at Leeds, 185; student of Charles Lloyd, 315– 16n34 Puseyism: pejorative name for Tractarianism, 225, 234, 237, 247; term for Tractarianism in Methodist press, 54, 119, 259. See also Tractarianism Pushthrough, 260 Quaker, 115–16

Index

Quebec, 13, 154, 277; Church of England colonial college in, 317n48; Congregationalist mission in, 165; merchant at Sandy Point, 276; mission on eastern border set up by Bishop George Jehoshaphat Mountain of, 175; Newfoundland fishermen to, 175; visit of clergyman from St Clement’s diocese to Forteau, 157; visit of Bishop George J. Mountain to Lower North Shore of, 156. See also Lower North Shore Queen of Sheba, 28 Queen’s College (St John’s). See Theological Institution Quin, Mr (at Rose Blanche), 43, 270–1 Quirpon, 167 Rachel, Aunt (of Bonavista Bay), 107, 147 Ragged Islands, 197 Ramea, 243, 263, 268 rank, 93, 275; according to experience of God, 84; church, 84, 92, 259; class, 219, 233, 269; economic, 92. See also class; democratic religion; egalitarianism ranters, 101, 143, 172 rationalism, 3–4, 33, 37, 304n6 Reay, John, 128–9, 131 Record (London): anti-Tractarian crusade of, 46, 71–2, 90–1, 192–5, 217, 226, 258–9, 320n20; Protestant focus of, 53, 91, 192, 339n122; subscriptions in Newfoundland to, 258, 281; transatlantic Newfoundland news in, 46, 53, 71–2, 90–1, 164, 192–5, 207, 217, 226, 258–9, 320n20, 339n122 Red Bay, 47; Horatio Storer and Jeffries Wyman at, 158; Methodists at, 154,

431

157, 159–60, 296; Protestant ecumenism at, 159 Reformation, 14, 31, 306n27, 323n74; Bishop Binney on, 54; and the nss, 101, 283; popularly esteemed, 44, 55–6; and Protestant ecumenism, 101, 174, 304n4; Tractarian antipathy to, 40, 138 Reformed Church of England, 88–90, 295, 328n50 Religious Tract Society, 101, 174, 192 Rencontre West, 38 Rendell, J.M., 60 Renews, 17 Rennie, James, 180 Rennie, John, 180 Renouf, Thomas, 270–1 repentance: and confession in Tractarianism, 194; before ecstasy, 99–100, 126, 247–9; in Protestant gospel preaching, 88, 109–10, 155, 175, 246– 9. See also auricular confession reserve. See under Tractarianism resettlement – on the Labrador coast: to Forteau from northern Labrador, 155; to Harrington Harbour from Burgeo, La Poile, West Point, 175; to Red Bay from Carbonear, 157 – on the northeast coast: to Bonavista North from Conception Bay, 104; to Change Islands and Seldom from Brigus, 86, 144; to Change Islands from Cupids, 86, 144; to Flat Islands from Carbonear, 105; to Fogo from St John’s, 143; to Little Bay Islands from Herring Neck, 130, 132; to Little Bay Islands from Tizzard’s Harbour, 130; to Little Bay Islands from Twillingate, 130, 132; to Seldom from Carbonear,

432

Index

144; to Seldom from Conception Bay, 145 – on the south coast: to Belleoram and Pushthrough from Fortune, 240–1; to Burgeo from Grand Bank and Fortune, 243, 264; to Burnt Islands from Fortune Bay, 243; to Channel– Port aux Basques from Grand Bank and Fortune, 243, 271; to Channel– Port aux Basques from Nova Scotia, 271; to Fortune from Francois, 244; to Garia from Grand Bank, 370n16; to Harbour Buffett from Collett’s Cove and Petty Harbour, 184; to Harbour Buffett from Haystack and Burin peninsula, 184; to Harbour Buffett from within Placentia Bay, 178–9; to Harbour Le Cou from Grand Bank, 370n16; to Petites from Grand Bank and Fortune, 243, 370n16; to Samitches from Deer Island, 250 – on the west coast: to Anticosti from Channel–Port aux Basques, 277; to the Bay of Islands from Bay St George, 285; to the Bay of Islands from Cape Breton, 287; to Bonne Bay from the Bay of Islands, 289–90; to Bonne Bay from Conception Bay via Labrador fishery, 291; to Bonne Bay from northeast coast via Labrador fishery, 291; to Bonne Bay from Nova Scotia, 291; to Bonne Bay from Port aux Basques area, 291; to Burgeo from Grand Bank and Fortune, 243; to Channel–Port aux Basques from Grand Bank and Fortune, 243; to Codroy from Nova Scotia, 276; to Frenchman’s Cove from St Pierre, 285; to McIver’s from Burgeo, 285; to McIver’s from Burin,

285; to Petites from Grand Bank and Fortune, 243; to Sandy Point from Cape Breton, 277 respectability, 60–1, 131, 133, 140, 196, 199, 210, 215, 217, 232–3, 236, 271, 298, 338n110 responsible government. See democracy revivals, 27, 118, 127–8; at Bonavista, Bird Island Cove, and Catalina, 99– 100; at Burin, 239–40, 364n43; at Change Islands, 145; at Channel– Port aux Basques, Garia, and Petites, 274, 277, 292; declared “unreal” by Bishop Feild, 101–2; at Fogo, 142; at Grand Bank, 240; at Grates Cove, 97; in Ireland, 123; on the Labrador coast, 172–3; at Leeds, 259; on the northeast coast, 172; at Sandbanks, 267; of sealers on Pool’s Island, 105; at Twillingate, 122–3, 125–6, 188; at the winter quarters of Red Bay livyers, 160 Reynolds, John, 114 Richard’s Harbour, 244 Richmond, John P., 176 Riddet, James, 250 Rigs, Jeremiah, 333n46 riots, 10, 15 Roberts, John, 98, 102, 117; Feild’s opinion of, 48, 90, 93–5, 152–3; pamphlet of, the Glorious, 91–2, 187, 328–9n56; Protestantism of, 46, 74, 90–2, 95, 295 Robertson, James: obtained agreement for a church at Harbour Breton, 242; reconnaissance of south coast, 26, 190, 230, 237, 244–5, 263–4, 269, 276, 365n61 Robinson, Sir Bryan, 59, 191, 194, 200, 206, 208–12, 216, 219 Rock Harbour, 182–3, 350n16

Index

Rocky Harbour, 41, 290–1 Rodgers, James, 96 Rogers, J.D., 228 Roman Breviary, 315–16n34 Romanesque, 319n1 romanticism: landscape, 34, 38, 40, 136, 168, 257, 286, 288; Tractarian, 13, 29– 31, 33–4, 37–8, 40, 42–3, 155, 257, 314n9, 317n49. See also Gothic; Tractarianism Rose Blanche, 15, 25, 42–3, 264, 267, 270 Rouse, Maria, 47, 95–6 Rouse, Oliver, 47, 91–2, 95–7, 98, 102, 328–9n56, 329n66 Rowe, Mrs (of Cupids), 86, 144 Royal Instructions, 212, 358n144 Royal Navy. See under Bay St George; British Empire; Hawk; ships Rozier, William, 46, 234, 237–40, 261, 266, 364n37 Rule, Ulric Zwinglius, 291–2, 296, 309n52; veered from uniformity, 287–8; vision of Jesus, 165 Russell, Thomas, 223 Ryle, John C., 176 Sabbath: non-observance at Sandy Point of, 280; not fishing but doing tasks at Hermitage on, 249; observance at Battle Harbour and Sandwich Bay of, 162, 170; school on, 160, 174, 253–4; services in fishermen’s boats on, 243; work on the flake if necessary at Forteau on, 149 sacraments. See Real Presence under Tractarianism; baptism sailing: Joseph Curling, 288; H.P. Disney, 163; Bishop Feild, 3, 20, 22, 25– 8, 50, 52, 57, 64–5, 67, 73, 75, 99, 120, 130, 149, 160, 166, 178, 228, 251, 263,

433

284–5, 291, 293, 300, 310–11n58; fishermen and sealers, 85, 150, 158, 168–9, 172, 175–6, 239–40, 243–4; Richard Hurrell Froude, 32, 310n54 Saint John, 72, 298, 306–7n31 Saint, John, 132 saints’ days, 19, 41, 53–4, 265, 283 Sall, Earnest, 126, 136–9 Salmon Bay, 173–5, 316n37, 348n80 Salmon Cove, 85, 87 salvage. See wrecking Salvage, 100–2, 137, 147, 330n7 Salvation Army, 172–3, 348n77 Samitches (Sam Hitches Harbour, Long Island Harbour), 250 Samways, Peter, 120 Sandbanks, 267 Sandwich Bay, 35, 151, 162, 169–71, 173, 177, 296 Sandy Point, 46, 277–83, 285, 287, 307n38, 373–4n66; commercial hub of west coast at, 280; diversity at, 277–8, 292, 296; evangelical Anglicanism at, 280–1, 283, 292, 296 Saunders, Mr (Hunt’s factor), 163 Saunders, Mr (student), 45, 69 Scots, 48, 79, 180, 276–8, 296 Scott, Francis, 337n102 Scott, George Gilbert, 11, 63–4 Scott, William, 155 Seal Cove, 294, 313–14n6 sealers, 8, 81–2, 85, 98, 100, 110–11, 316n37, 331n19 sealing, 34, 75; and insecurity, 28, 84–6, 111, 123, 168–9; and mobility, xvii, 19, 100, 104–5, 172, 301, 309–10n52 sealing vessels, 40, 85, 105, 110, 169. See also under ships Seal Islands, 163 Sears, Thomas, 275 Seaton, James, 68

434

Index

sects, 26, 29, 58, 68, 92, 115–16, 242–3, 256, 309n51, 312–13n80 Seldom-Come-By, 86, 130, 144–6 September 1846 gale, 64–5, 95, 185; in Conception Bay, 93–4; in Burin, 231–3, 261 Sergent, John, 333n46 settlement: development of, 19, 309– 10n52 Shears, William, 172 Shepherd, Richard, 244–5 ships – merchant: Lavinia, 94 – passenger: City of Halifax, 371n26; Great Eastern, 30, 177; Unicorn, 321n39 – Royal Navy: Alligator, 26, 241, 250; Cleopatra, 129–30, 134; Electra, 279; Gannet, 171; Hydra, 156, 160; Manly, 26, 242, 263; Orestes, 26, 241, 250; Tyne, 242; Wellesley, 26. See also under Bay St George; British Empire; Hawk – sealing: Commodore, 82; Deerhound, 85; Four Brothers, 82; Huntsman, 169; Lion, 85; Nimrod, 85; Panther, 3; Wolf, 84–5. See also sealing vessels – yachts: Emma Eden, 21; Lavrock, 288, Star, 342n163. See also Hawk Shoe Cove, 141 Short, Edward, 33 Shorter, A., 227 Shower, John, 114 Sider, Gerald M., 331n28 Sierra Leone, 46, 353n61 Simms, Charles, 222, 324n90, 360n170 Simms, James A., 184, 222 Sinclair, John, 180 singing, 158, 224, 245, 250; of Bishop Feild on the Hawk, 20; in church, 129, 158, 278–9; and dancing on

Sunday, 149; in houses, 245; of Moravians, 170; at picnic, 138; at service in merchant’s store, 151; at weddings, 250; at winter quarters, 224. See also hymns Skinner, H.M., 101 Slade, John, 120, 134 Slade, John Jr, 116, 128, 143, 163, 368n103 Slade, Robert, 128 Small, Joseph, 266 Smith, Caleb, 333n46 Smithies, John, 230 Smith, John, 333n46 Smith, Mary, 16 Smith, Philip E.L., 310n53 Smith, Walter, 307n32 Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 102, 111, 114–15, 207, 225 Society for the Propagation of Religious Knowledge, 114–15 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts: funded local clergy, 12; quarterly reports sent to, 12. See also Ernest Hawkins Solomon, 28 Sound Island, 190, 201; Methodism at, 80, 179, 223–7, 295, 361n117 Southampton, 114 Southern Shore, 8, 16–17. See also Aquaforte; Ferryland; Toad’s Cove Spaniard’s Bay, 105 spck. See Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge Spencer, Aubrey George, 54, 56, 68–9, 88, 129–30, 134, 224–5, 246, 264–5, 339n124; enlisted nss teachers, 12, 57, 82–3, 180, 182, 184–5, 260, 283, 284; an evangelical bishop, 18, 67, 82–3, 91, 146, 181, 189, 226, 230–1,

Index

295, 330n10; plans for cathedral of, 9, 57, 63, 73, 180, 297, 321n44 Spencer’s Cove, 197, 201 spg. See Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts spirituality. See evangelical Anglicanism; evangelicalism; Gothic; Irish; Methodism; popular religion; Protestantism; Tractarianism Spoon Cove (Epworth), 240 Sprague, Samuel W., 225, 231–2, 234, 238 sprk. See Society for the Propagation of Religious Knowledge Spurgeon, Charles H., 176 Spurrier, Christopher, 229, 362n5 Stanley, Edward, 322n60 Starve Harbour (Herring Neck), 38 St Augustine’s College (Canterbury), 86, 89, 269, 282, 300, 326n26, 327n34 Stephenson, John, 361n175 Stewart, James William, 180 Stewart, William, 176 St Georges. See Bay St George, Flat Bay, Sandy Point St John’s, 3, 9, 12, 34–5, 58–62, 75, 359n157; Bishop Feild’s little time in, 22, 24, 52, 57–8; little communication with the western shore and west coast at, 269–70, 272, 276, 280, 290; Methodism at, 116, 130–1, 142, 150, 183, 238; metropolis for east and northeast coast, and Placentia Bay, 20, 60–1, 73, 81, 85, 93, 96, 102, 130, 135, 142–3, 161, 180, 209, 223; opposition to Bishop Feild at, 5, 43, 51–2, 54–7, 64–5, 67–71, 73–4, 95, 119, 136, 180, 206, 294; Tractarianism at, 26, 37, 42–3, 45, 54–5, 91, 137, 161, 288; ultramontanism at, 6–8, 50–2, 62–4, 67, 304n6, 319n1

435

St John’s Church (St John’s). See under churches St John, William Charles, 93–4, 220, 254, 355n85 St Lawrence, 229 St Mary’s Bay, 62, 202 St Mary’s (Islington), 192 St Mary’s (St John’s). See under churches St Mary the Virgin (Birchy Cove). See under churches St Mary the Virgin (Lamaline). See under churches Storer, Horatio, 22, 158 St Pierre, 228–9, 285 Strachan, John, 317n44 Straight Shore, 150 Strait of Belle Isle, 154, 156, 343n1 Strickland, Thomas, 264, 365n57 Strickland, William, 250, 365n57 St Saviour’s (Hermitage Cove). See under churches St Saviour’s (Leeds), 185, 259 St Thomas’s Church (St John’s). See under churches Stuckles, James, 114, 333n46 Stuckles, Joseph, 333n46 Stuckles, Richard, 333n46 Sturminster Newton, 244, 313–14n6 St Wulstan, 65–6 Sunday observance: in vernacular culture, 101, 132, 144, 149, 157, 162, 169, 171, 175, 182, 226, 231, 244, 260, 264, 276–7, 279 Sunday school, 47, 120, 133–4, 138, 144 supernatural. See miracles Sutcliffe, Ingham, 238, 251 Swain’s Island, 105–7, 110, 113, 331n25 Swing Riots, 10 Sydney (Australia), 46 Sydney (Cape Breton), 44, 270, 272

436

Index

Tarrant, Maria, 96 Taylor, Mary Ann, 144 Taylor, Rebecca, 86, 144 Taylor, Robert Holland, 80; an ardent Tractarian, 83, 86–7, 295; to Brigus from St Augustine’s College, 83, 86; built internally correct Gothic church, 86–8; dependent on sealing captain John Bartlett, 86; in the midst of evangelical Anglicans and Methodists, 87–8; protest of Tractarian changes against, 89, 98 Taylor’s Gulch, 38 Taylor, William, 86 telegraph cable, 30, 177, 272 temperance, 10, 229, 292; and Band of Hope, 273–4; and Sons of Temperance, 273–4, 292 Temporalities Bill. See Irish Church Temporalities Bill Ten Commandments, 128, 336n88 Tentin, John, 245 Theological Institution (Queen’s College, St John’s), 91, 130, 140–1, 167, 185; dismissal of Charles Blackman from, 69; evangelical phase of, 137; Jacob George Mountain wanted as principal of, 252; name change to Theological Institute of, 340n136; study of Gothic architecture at, 103; Tractarian changes to, 45, 233–4, 238 Theophilus Anglicanus, 103, 235, 238 Thirty-Nine Articles, 92 Thomas, William, 68, 70, 180, 368n106 Thomey, Arthur, 248 Thoresby, William, 80–1 Tilt Cove, 117 tilts. See winter quarters Tizzard’s Harbour, 127, 129–30, 147 T., Mr (of Swain’s Island), 105 Toad’s Cove (Tors Cove), 38

Tocque, Philip, 81, 254–6 Torbay, 20–1, 38 Torquay, 21 Tractarianism: accoutrements of, 3, 42– 3, 51, 53, 61, 151, 160, 299; and antiquity, 30–1, 34, 40, 49, 83, 86, 273, 275, 298, 300, 323n67, 326n26; and awe, xviii, 30–1, 34, 38, 53, 63, 86–7, 103, 126, 140, 155, 168, 239, 275, 317n49, 326n26; and chanting, 30, 40, 83, 193, 283; and ethos, xvii, 25, 30–1, 45, 61, 140, 209, 317n49; an expensive religion, 40, 42, 51, 53, 61–3, 151, 265, 273, 299, 316n39, 376n15; and facing east, 42, 52, 76, 92; and medieval past, 30–1, 40, 83, 138, 192; and mystery, 37–8, 40, 52–3, 85, 87, 147, 151, 259, 268; and Oxford Tracts, 54–5, 354n78; and patristic era, 30–1, 40; and processions, 42, 69, 87, 121, 133, 252; and Real Presence, 28–9, 37, 54, 88, 90–1, 118, 161, 265, 281, 293; and reserve, 4, 138, 317n49; and retreat from excitement, 29–30, 33– 4, 141, 145, 239, 252, 340n139; and saints’ days, 19, 41, 53–5, 265, 283; and self-denial, 22–5, 96, 158–9, 179, 192, 252, 317n49; and solemnity, xvii, 3–4, 17, 30, 32, 37, 39–40, 52, 86–7, 103–4, 125–6, 140–1, 146, 150– 1, 193, 239, 261, 273–5, 293–4, 297–9, 342n161; and weekly Eucharist, 90, 273, 281, 283, 328n49. See also asceticism; altar candles; apostolic succession; baptismal regeneration under baptism; colleges; episcopacy; feeling; Gothic; holiness; industrialization; invented tradition; Irish Church Temporalities Bill; Oriel College; Oxford; Puseyism; romanticism

Index

tract distribution: xvii, 19–20, 40, 114, 116, 161, 179, 274, 299; by Congregationalists, 173–5, 296, 316n37; by Methodists, 86, 147, 243; by the nss, 101, 109–11, 147, 259–60, 316n37, 331n19; by Tractarians, 54–5, 192, 225, 354n78 tradesmen. See artisans transatlantic communication, 290–1; by newspapers, 6, 15, 29, 53–7, 192– 3, 195, 210–11, 216–17, 346n46, 368n108; by pamphlets, 6, 200, 206– 7. See also telegraph cable. See also under Colonial Church Chronicle transhumance. See population mobility Tremlett, Francis William, 50 Trinity, 70, 75, 101, 115, 281, 308n47; diversity at, 115 Trinity Bay, 15–16, 62, 173, 241, 339n124, 376n15; Methodists in, 89, 150; Reformed Church of England in, 89–90, 295 Troeltsch, Ernst, 83–6 Trollope, Anthony, 64, 312n75 Trout River, 285, 289–90 trusteeism, 6–7, 77, 120 Tuckwell, Henry, 70 Tulk, Charles, 196, 209 Tulk, William, 229 Turner, Frank M., 3–4, 304n5, 313n2, 323n67 Turner, J.M.W., 168 Twillingate, 5, 25, 60, 109, 131–2, 134– 5, 172, 184, 335n71, 336n88, 359n157, 376n15; Congregationalists at, 114–16, 124, 326n16, 333n46, 334n51; diversity at, 114–16, 124–5, 334n51, 336n79; evangelical Anglicanism at, 46, 116–19, 124, 181, 297, 299, 340n131; Methodism at, 113,

437

119–30, 132, 139, 142, 147, 168–9; opposition to Bishop Feild at, 120–2 ultramontanism. See under St John’s uniformity. See Order and Uniformity United Empire Loyalists, 12, 297 Upper Amherst Cove, 126, 137 Upper Burgeo, 265–7. See also Burgeo, Cornelius Island Upper Island Cove, 20 Vallis, Susannah: was refused church rites, 255 Vatcher, Mr (of Henley Harbour), 166 vernacular religion. See popular religion Vey, Dinah, 236 Vicars, Johnstone, 46, 70, 113, 139, 324n80 Vidal, Owen E., 353n61 Vincent, Charles, 244 visions. See miracles voice: in historical writing, 4–6 voluntary principle: advocacy for, 72–3, 191; Bishop Feild against societies based on, 67, 251; replaced by compulsory giving in Church Society, 58, 72–3, 219; spoken against by Alfred Gabriel and Robert John Parsons, 239, 360n66 Waddell, A., 274 Waghorne, Arthur C., 89–90 Wallbridge, Elizabeth, 111 Walley, Thomas, 102 Ward’s Harbour (Beaumont), 120, 132– 4, 300 Ward, W.S., 222–3 Warren, Mr (of Indian Tickle), 171 Watts, Claudius, 80 Watts, Isaac, 115

438

Index

Welsh, 48, 90, 94–5, 152–3 Wesleyan. See Provincial Wesleyan Wesleyanism. See Methodism Wesleyan Methodist Conference of Eastern British America, 272 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, 230, 232, 264 Wesley, John, 14, 17, 81, 277 Wesley Vale, 363n17 Wesleyville, 331n25 West, Charles Rock, 101, 330n7 west coast, 16, 59, 213, 276–92, 296, 309n52 western shore, 241, 243, 263–75, 277, 291–2, 295–6, 367n92 Westfall, William, 298 West Point, 175 Wheeler, William, 114, 333n46 White Bay, 15, 25, 82, 298, 300, 374n78 White Bear Bay, 244, 250, 263 Whiteley, William: converted at Salmon Bay, 348n80 White, Percival, 91 Whiteway, 89 White, William Kepple, 46, 91, 349n9, 352n39; at Harbour Breton, 254–6, 260–2, 367n96, 368n106; at Harbour Buffett, 5–6, 179–80, 182–3, 185–227, 234, 258, 266, 295, 349n9, 355n83, 355n90, 357n128; pamphlet by, 207– 11 Wilberforce, Robert Isaac: at Oriel College, 10 Wilcox, Miss (of Brigus): resettled to Seldom, 86, 144 wild: nature seen as, 34, 95, 162, 169, 192, 288, 300; people regarded as, 15–16, 88, 115, 117, 122, 133, 169, 249, 277, 284, 295 Williams, Isaac: on self-denial, 159

Williams, John Symes: first student of St Augustine’s, 327n34 Wills, Sarah, 250 Wilson, Daniel: leader of Islington evangelicals, 354n78; wrote anti-Tractarian pamphlet, 192 Wilson, William: insight that the fishermen were missionaries of, 243; Methodist missionary in Placentia Bay, 184, 224; ministered from winter quarters at Burin, 231, 247 Wilton, Solomon: at Woody Point, 291 Windsor, William: at Swain’s Island, 110 Winser, Peter: Roman Catholic convert at Aquaforte, 16–17, 57–8 Winsor, Naboth, 331n25; on Methodist societies, 81 Winter, James, 135–6 winter quarters: George Baring Cowan, a graphic description of, 325n4; Methodist missionary living in, 231; much wood production at, 110–11; often in Bermuda for Bishop Feild, 24, 311n67; rare to see a clergyman in, 19, 156 winter transhumance – on the Labrador coast: from Carbonear, 344n26; from Forteau, 156 – on the northeast coast: from Change Islands to Dog Bay, 342n158; from Change Islands to Seldom, 86, 144; from Fogo to “in the bay,” 142; from Greenspond, 110 – on the south coast: from Burgeo to La Poile Bay, 266; from Grole, 247; from Burin to Freshwater Pond and Mortier Bay, 231; from Burin to the western shore, 367n92; from Sound Island to Piper’s Hole, 224

Index

– on the west coast: from McIver’s to Harbour Island, 285. See also wood Winton, Henry: editor of Public Ledger, 65, 125, 187–8, 209–10, 357n122 Wix, Edward, 51, 58; antipathy to nss of, 12, 77, 101; and rebaptism, 251; report of degeneracy in Bay of Islands of, 249, 283–5; visits to the south and west coasts of, 26, 179, 224, 229, 244, 246, 248–51, 257–60, 264, 276–8, 287, 365n57 wmms. See Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society women: baptized infants, 8, 15, 300; class leaders, 86, 120, 132, 144, 167; cooks on the room, 149; funded missionaries, 101, 284, 288; in the fishery, 119, 158, 162, 242, 280; lay readers, 176, 244; missionaries, 175– 7; preachers, 80,100; public prayer leaders, 174; rowers, 15; school teachers, 95; spiritual leaders in communities, 80, 86, 107, 127–8, 167, 175–7, 244; Sunday school teachers, 276 wood: and Gothic, 11, 87, 155, 157, 288; and winter transhumance, 20, 24–5, 110–11, 136, 231, 247, 258, 267, 301, 342n158, 361n180

439

Wood, Samuel Francis, 313n83, 317n49 Woods, Joseph: editor of Courier, 206, 210, 216–8 Wood, T.M., 70–1, 143–4, 246 Woody Island: fisherman who left estate to nss from, 223; Methodists at, 223; school at, 201 Woody Point: centre of Ulrich Rule’s mission, 291 Worcester, 4, 31, 55 Worcestershire, 183 Wordsworth, Christopher, 103, 234–5, 238 Wordsworth, William: nephew at Battle Harbour of, 164–5 Woundy, John, 229–30 wrecking, 239, at Sandy Point, 280; providential timber for Lamaline church from, 239 Wyman, Jeffries: man of science at Red Bay, 22, 158–9 Yates, Nigel, 29 Yeovil, 115 Young, Abraham, David, and John: and Hart’s Cove cemetery, 335n72