In 1817, the practice of having governors spend their winters in England is discontinued when Admiral Francis Pickmore is ordered by the king to winter in Newfoundland.
Pickmore returns to England in April, but is unable to give a satisfactory account of what winter in Newfoundland is like, being by that time six weeks dead.
The winter of 1817-1818, known variously as Pickmore’s Winter, the Winter of the Rals and the Winter of the Rowdies, is an especially severe one. The entire east and northeast coasts are blocked by ice from late fall until late spring. The merchants are further inconvenienced when eight thousand people left homeless by a series of fires begin looting their already depleted stocks.
Pickmore is succeeded by Sir Charles Hamilton, the first governor to survive a Newfoundland winter. He survives seven, in fact, but writes constantly to England predicting that he will “soon perish like poor Pickmore, so drafty is our tumbledown old house.”
Hamilton demands that a new Government House be built, and England meets his demands not long after he leaves Newfoundland for good.
His successor, Sir Thomas Cochrane, announces his intention to build himself a house in which there will be no possibility whatsoever of catching one’s death from drafts. The death-by-drafts-proof house costs a quarter of a million dollars, but would, as Cochrane points out, have cost a good deal less had not the planner confused it with another house he was building in the West Indies and built a moat around it to ward off deadly snakes.