"The spectre of corporal punishment continued to hang over fishing communities in the early nineteenth century. An incident which occurred in Burin in 1810 illustrates the symbiotic relationship between sectarian tension, class conflict, and the use of public whipping. According to the local justice of the peace, the problem started when he sentenced a local man to be whipped:
In the first place a man was brought before me with a complaint that he had gone on board one of Mr. Spurrier's vessels, prevented the crew from working and beat two of them and threatened the master - his sentence was to receive 39 lashes at the usual place of punishment - but the morning the punishment should have taken place nearly the whole of the Irish servants came to Mr. Morris (a merchant here) and offered £150 rather than it should be executed (the punishment) - but they had said before should the prisoner be brought to the place of punishment, they would shed some blood and take him away by force - Some other cases of the same nature, and equally as bad, have now come before me - when the people have threatened to take the life of the first constable that should attempt to apprehend the offender.
The magistrate viewed this incident as involving much more than simply a protest against whipping. He portrayed it as the outbreak of a serious challenge to the social order which only the presence of the Royal Navy could extinguish:
The Irish servants (which are very numerous) are at this time absolutely in a state of mutiny and without some armed force be stationed here, the lives of the inhabitants are in danger. Probably on account of their wages they may be kept within bounds until the expiration of their time of servitude (20th October) but, when they become their own masters, I could not answer for them. If His Excellency therefore would have the goodness to station one of His Majesty's Schooners here for the Winter, it would have an excellent effect and I have not a doubt but that regularity and good behaviour would, by that means be kept in this district.
So long as servants were kept under contract, they were seen as controllable, but the justice of the peace dreaded the prospect of facing masterless men. Like his predecessors in the eighteenth century, he saw the Royal Navy as the vital safeguard of authority."
- Jerry Bannister, The Rule of the Admirals: Law, Custom, and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699-1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 253-254.






















