The evolution of the Newfoundland justice system culminates in 1792 with the establishment of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland. John Reeves (deemed by Prowse “a most admirable selection” — judge not the judge, judge, lest ye be judged) becomes its first chief justice. Unfortunately, his objectivity is called into question in 1793, when he publishes the first history of the oldest colony and in it sets forth the thesis that England has for three hundred years been exploiting Newfoundland.
While we could hardly expect Chief Justice Reeves to write a history as authoritative as this one, since he did not have access to the enormous volume of documents, the perusal of which has been our happy task this twenty years, or to the succession of other Newfoundland histories from whose blunders we have learned so much; and while we do not wish to cast aspersions on the man whom some have called Newfoundland’s Herodotus, our History would fall short of being definitive in one respect did we not point out that John Reeves was a peevish crank who wrote an entire history of Newfoundland just to get back at some West Country merchants who, he said, “are so miserly that, were I to allow it, they would be constantly contesting in my court some Newfoundlander’s right to breathe their air.”
What do we find upon reading Reeve’s successors, Anspach, Harvey, Pedley, Prowse, et al., but that they repeat in their histories this heinous lie of his as though it were the gospel truth. While we trust that our history refutes his thesis to the satisfaction of educated people everywhere, the fact that we cannot undo the harm he has done has on many occasions kept us from a good night’s sleep and given rise in our nature to an irritability that many have named as the reason they will never speak to us again.
Such are the travails of the historian who, because his predecessors are dead, must content himself with lying awake at night concocting fantasies in which he so humiliates them in debate that they pledge to burn all existing copies of their books. To such lengths are we driven by reading Reeves, as well as to tapping our foot on the floor, which we must refrain from doing, for there have been complaints, and we cannot afford to be evicted from yet another boarding-house, there being so few left that we can afford, having had to forgo an income these past twenty years to make possible the writing of this book. That our history will sell in such volume as to compensate ten times over for the income lost while writing it seems little comfort now.