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342 a group of thirty islands great and small. Only a short stretch of the coast had then been explored, the thousands of mariners who crossed from Europe every spring being interested solely in what the neighbouring shoals held for them.

The first patentee of the uncharted tract was Sir Humphrey Gilbert who made an attempt at colonisation in 1583. On his return to England he was lost in the ten-ton pinnace Squirrel. No heirs claimed his Newfoundland plantation. In 1610 it was granted to the "Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London and Bristol, for the Colony of Newfoundland." The company comprised many noblemen, among them the Earl of Northampton and Sir Francis Bacon. The latter wrote the prospectus, "a truly Baconian production" in which he compared the fisheries of the New Isle to the mines of Peru, to Newfoundland's advantage.

The first settlers sent out by the London and Bristol Company were conducted by John Guy, a Bristol alderman who arrived in Conception Bay in 1610. He found on the shores Indians of the Bethukan family who coloured themselves, their utensils and weapons with red ochre. Though of lighter complexion than most North American aborigines, they were for this reason called Red Men. The French and their Micmac allies eventually banished or massacred the Beoths, so that a century ago not one could be found in the island