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CAMBRIOL. THE SrORY OF A FORGOTTEN COLONY. By E. Roland Williams, M.A. IT has been customary, even amongst Welsh historians, to regard the founding of Patagonia in the eighteen-fifties as the one attempt ever made to establish a distinctively Welsh colony. Leaving aside the fact that Patagonia was intended as a mission, rather than as a colony, and that it exists under a foreign sovereignty, the first attempt to found a Welsh colony was made more than two centuries before Patagonia was ever thought of. Its history belongs to the period of the very early beginnings of colonisation in North America, and it is a matter of no inconsiderable interest and historical importance to recall that, in close proximity to a struggling, embryonic New England and New Scotland (Nova Scotia), and very much about the same time as they were being founded, there came into existence also a New Wales or Cambriol." Cambriol had a bleak and troubled existence around Trepassey Bay in the Island of Newfoundland from 1616 till some time between 1630 and 1637. It was founded by a Carmarthenshire man, Sir William Vaughan, of Llangyndeym, and the emigrants whom Vaughan sent out were Welshmen also. Sir William Vaughan is one of the most quixotic figures in our national history. His quaint personality gives one a glimpse of the Voyaging Movement and the Renaissance on their last legs," as it were. He was a great scholar, even for such an age of pedants; he had travelled widely, and he wrote very volumi- nously in a fantastic vein of his own. The value of his writings lies in the occasional shrewd observations on economics and colonisation that occur like oases in a desert of long-winded and irrelevent allegories. It is little wonder that the actual details of the first Welsh attempt at colonisation should have remained obscure for so long when one considers the vast amount of wordy rubbish in which Vaughan lovingly smothered them. He was religious almost to the point of mania, and he believed that, on two occasions, his life had been miraculously saved so that he might devote it to some great project for the betterment of humanity, and especially of his native country, Wales. Vaughan sought in colonial expansion a remedy for the poverty and lack of enterprise, which, he averred, met his eye everywhere in the Principality. Describ- ing his native country, he wrote: Their mountains and commons lay desolate, not half stocked, and their cornfields in most places so bare of corn that a stranger would think that the earth produced such grain naturally wild." In spite of pestilence, the rural areas were so much over-populated for their resources that thousands died annually of sheer famine-" I have known in these last dear years that a hundred people have yearly died in a parish where the tithe amounted not to four score pounds a year, the most part for lack of food, fire, and raiment." But what Vaughan especially deplored in his fellow- countrymen was their lack of initiative in matters of navigation and colonjsation Our grievance is that instead of plentiful droves of cattle which heretofore served us as well for our sustentation as to supply our own necessities abroad our stock is decayed, and nowadays we rear up two-legged asses which do nothing but wrangle in law, the one with the other. By this ungracious brood we become so impoverished that our neighbours in Devonshire, notwithstanding our large circuit of the sea and our infinite extent of land, go far beyond us in shipping and necessary trading. The Welsh, so he asserted, had not ten ships, while their neighbours of Devonshire, though not so favour- ably situated, flourished with a hundred and fifty ships. He conceived, therefore, the plan of founding a plantation — a Cambric! or New Wales similar to that Nova Scotia which his great friend, Sir William Alexander, was seeking to establish in Acadia. A brave design it is; it promises renown to the King, Revenue to the Crown, Treasure to the Kingdom, a purchase for the land, a prize for the sea, ships for navigation, navigation for ships, mariners for both, entertainment for the rich, employment for the poor, advantages for the adventurers, and increase of trade for all subjects." He would leave this monument to posterity, that a Combro-Briton hath founded a new Cambriol, where he made the deaf to hear and the woods to move and, from the distant shores of Newfoundland the hardy pioneer, John Guy of Bristol, greeted the scheme with a sonnet:- New Cambriol's planter sprung from Golden Grove, Old Cambria's soil up to the skies doth raise, For which let Fame crown him with sacred bays." He was in some doubt at first as to where he should plant his Cambriol. At the outset, Soldana or Saint Helena occurred to him as suitable places; a plan- tation there would be a convenient port of call for the East India fleets; but the climate of both places was unhealthy; they could only be reached by a long and tedious voyage; they were always open to attacks by Spain. Nor did Virginia and the Bermudas attract him. But he saw in Newfoundland, the next land beyond Ireland," a country reserved by God for us Britons," and only a fortnight's sail distant given a favourable wind. It cost only ten shillings per head to convey colonists thither, whilst the passage to Virginia cost five pounds. Moreover, Newfoundland had been boomed as a field for colonisation ever since Anthony Parkhurst had visited the island in 1573. Parkhurst and the few pioneers who had followed him had all painted a glowing picture of the fertility of the island, over- grown in the cleared areas with a wild crop of goose- berries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, and red and white damask roses, which are most beautiful and delightful." They had dwelt on the virgin resources of the great forests in timber and bark and charcoal for iron-smetlting — besides the valuable fur-trade that could be started. Besides, the Indians were docile