Inscription on Richard Welsh's Headstone:Welsh helped regulate Irish labour in Placentia, placing young servants with English planters and supervising the several specialized tasks undertaken by the Irish ashore.
Placentia was by now the centre of a flourishing fishery. The number of fishing ships and fishermen had almost doubled since Welsh's arrival but more striking was the growth in the resident fishery and associated Irish passenger trade. Between 600 and 900 servants arrived annually, there were 170 planters in the district, and the residents' catch accounted for 45% of the total. With the outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1756 the migratory ship fishery from North Devon collapsed, never to recover. During the war Placentia depended largely on a resident fishery conducted inshore. Poole in Dorset replaced the North Devon ports as the organizational centre of the ship fishery, and the importance of Waterford and its hinterland as a source of labour and provisions increased. It was under these changing conditions that Richard Welsh, twenty years a resident of Placentia, finally entered trade on his own account.
Few data survive on the details of Welsh's early trade, but in 1753 he rented some ground on the Great Beach of Placentia from a long established English planter and built premises there. Over the next few years he acquired at least five more properties from nearby English planters. These properties formed the core of Welsh's trading domain and continued as headquarters for more than a century.
Welsh quickly emerged as the leading merchant in the harbour of Placentia, where the Irish outnumbered the English two to one. Indeed the district of Placentia was the most Irish part of the island, accounting for one third of the total Irish population in the summer of 1759 and over 40% of all Irish women and children. Welsh took advantage of his connections to build up an ethnic trade but also maintained commercial links with the local English planters. His drive to capture the commerce of the district was contested by the merchants of Poole, and a bitter struggle ensued.
Of the merchant families from Poole attempting to establish a ranch at Little Placentia during the Seven Years' War; only the Quaker house of Neaves and Company, drawing on Quaker merchants in Waterford for passengers and provisions, succeeded and in fact became the main rivals to Welsh and his successors. Welsh dominated trade at Great Placentia but did not monopolize it. He apparently focussed on local traffic, issuing supplies to planters and servants and collecting their fish.
Trade at Placentia peeked after the Seven Years' War, as settlement expanded and the harbour continued to dominate the fishery of the bay. It was during this period that Welsh laid the foundations for a merchant firm that was transatlantic in scoupe with respectable international connections. He hired William Saunders of Bideford as his principal agent and revived links with old ship owing families such as the Hoggs and Salmons of North Devon and Placentia , long engaged in the trade. More importantly he forged closer ties with Waterford and Wexford, and with Iberia. These commercial connections were facilitated and consolidated by the marriages of his three daughters prior to his demise. In 1767 his daughter Bridget, with a dowry of 10,000- dazzling, by the standards of the time- married Paul Farrell, son of Dominick, one of the leading Waterford merchants in the Irish- Newfoundland trade. Dominick Farrell was engaged in a ship fishery at Trinity harbour, North of Placentia, but Paul apparently linked up with his father-in-law to carry on a triangular trade among the ports of Waterford, Placentia and Cadiz, where the Farrell dynasty operated a major branch house. Another daughter, Ann, married William Saunders and although the evidence remains circumstantial, the third, Mary, probably married Roger Sweetman, son of Michael of Newbawn, a parish close to Richard Welsh's native place in Co. Wexford.
Richard Welsh died at Placentia in the fall of 1770, still relatively young but one of Wexford's most successful overseas merchants.
Inscription on Richard Welsh's Headstone:
