Note 33 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Canadian Archives, B. 216, pp. 14, sqq.
No proceedings seem to have been taken on this Petition and it is probable that Mr. Adams had to stand the loss on Francis Cole the said Yankee Boy as Campbell did on Sarah Cole of Pennsylvania.
Indians were not the only slavers. As soon as the Declaration of Independence was promulgated, if not before, Boston began to fit out privateers to prey on British trade. We read of four privateers reported by Governor Montague as seen in the Straits of Belle Island in 1776, two off Placentia in 1777 and in 1778 committing daily depredations on the coast of Newfoundland. They harried the unprotected fishermen and the farmers of Newfoundland and Labrador but some at least of them went further. Those who had demanded political freedom themselves denied even personal freedom to others. They seized and carried away into slavery some of the unoffending natives, the Eskimos, who were freemen and whose only crime was their helplessness. One instance will suffice. The Minerva privateer of Boston, Captain John Grimes, Master, mounting 20 nine pounders and manned with 160 men landed on Sandwich Bay, Labrador, at Captain George Cartwright's station, took his brig, The Countess of Effingham, loaded her with his fish and provisions and sent her off to Boston. Cartwright not unnaturally said: "May the Devil go with them." "The Minerva also took away four Eskimo to be made slaves of." W. G. Gosling, Labrador, Toronto, n. d., pp. 192, 244, 245, 333.