when an exploring party was sent to search for them.
The merchants who owned the fishing fleets opposed the colonisation of Newfoundland and for a hundred years an incessant conflict was waged by the planters and the fishing admirals who represented the companies in England.
Newfoundland was created a colony in 1728 at the beginning of a more lenient era for her settlers, but the construction of permanent buildings was not permitted until almost another century had elapsed. The covetousness of the French and the tenacity of those to whom the island belonged by right of discovery, led to years of assault and antagonism which four treaties failed to govern. The French established themselves oh Placentia Bay but surrendered their claims in 1713 and retired to the Miquelon Islands and Cape Breton. However, as late as the end of that century they were still attempting to bring about the colony's surrender to the French flag.
In return for her renunciation of territorial rights France had been granted by Bute, Prime Minister of England following William Pitt, certain fishing privileges on the west and north shore of the island which they wished to construe as giving them an inviolable hold upon 500 miles of coast line to the exclusion of the colonials themselves. The English maintained that the foreign fishermen were permitted only to catch and cure cod on this
