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    Cape St. George and the village of Mainland, which was to grow opposite Red Island, are French communities whose early inhabitants were in large part from Brittany. The Breton presence is also attested in the villages of Black Duck Brook, Winterhouses and Degras; a French geographer working at Cape St. George in about 1950 claims to have heard the Breton language spoken by certain old men who have since died. As we shall see shortly, family names in the region include typically Breton forms.

    Between Cartier's voyages and the end of the eighteenth century, the French presence on the West Coast does not seem to have led to any permanent settlement. Until the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France was, for all practical purposes, mistress of a major part of the Newfoundland coast with, as capital of its colony, the town of Plaisance or Placentia, situated in the bay of the same name. English colonies of the period were limited geographically to the eastern coast of the island of Newfoundland, between Cape Bonavista and what is known as the Southern Shore, the east coast of the Avalon Peninsula. But the Treaty of Utrecht, which brought an end to the War of Spanish Succession, the chief protagonists in which were England and France, took away from France not only her colony of Acadia, but also her Newfoundland possessions. France lost everything but her fishing and drying rights; and between 1713 and 1904, the limits of the French Shore were constantly diminishing. During the nineteenth century, the period of greatest interest to us as far as the contemporary French enclave is concerned, the French Shore extended from Cape Ray in the south to Cape Norman in the north.