Mr. Nisbet's Legacy, Or the Passing of King William's Act in 1699 (Thomas Nisbet ‪)‬

INTRODUCTION AN ACT TO ENCOURAGE THE TRADE TO NEWFOUNDLAND, 10 & 11 Wm. III, cap. 25, popularly known as King William's Act, was given royal assent on 4 May 1699. (1) This was the only act of Parliament that regulated the English fishery in Newfoundland until the supplementary act 15 Geo. III cap. 31 of 1775, An Act for the Encouragement of the Fisheries ... and for securing the Return of the Fishermen, Sailors and others ... Parliament did not repeal the act of 1699 until the act of 1824, 5 Geo. IV, cap. 51, An Act to repeal several Laws ... This act had been the legislative basis of the regulation of the fishery for 75 years, and its foundation for some 125 years. King William's Act has also been central to historians' interpretations of eighteenth-century Newfoundland. Unfortunately, officials such as Governor Hugh Palliser deliberately misrepresented the act in an attempt to have it support the policy they pursued. (2) Some of those involved in the fishery represented the act as having been intended to restore the ship fishery and restrain the inhabitant fishery. This point of view was published and made available to bolster this late-eighteenth-century partisan policy. Since a policy favouring the ship fishery was promoted for 50 years from 1775, the misrepresentations of the 1699 act became inseparable from the actual history of the period. Even today, historians, antiquarians, and genealogists cannot rid themselves of the influence of the language and ideas of that policy. Settling inhabitants are sometimes portrayed as "deserters" from fishing ships who "squatted" illegally in distant coves to escape detection by the Royal Navy. Such are the myths of our history.