Ireland and Newfoundland. Most landed in the Newfoundland ports of St. John's and Harbour Grace, and many moved on to smaller outports on the coast of the Avalon Peninsula. By the 1780s, the Irish had become the dominant ethnic group in and around the St. John's area, in a population of about 3,200. Many were engaged in fishing and had little formal education. Many were servants who came to Newfoundland alone, but others had families, in which the labour of women and children was essential. Most families had a small plot of land. By 1815 the Irish in Newfoundland numbered over 19,000. Emigration was encouraged by political discontent at home, overpopulation and impoverishment. It was also aided by the fact that legislation of 1803 designed to regulate conditions on British passenger vessels, making the passage too expensive for the poorest, such as the Irish, did not apply to Newfoundland, which was viewed as a fishery rather than a colony. Language and culture The use of the Irish language in Newfoundland was closely tied to the persistence of an ancestral culture preserved in scores of enclaves along the coast. That culture, in the Avalon Peninsula and elsewhere, included feast days, holy wells, games, mumming, Irish bardic poetry, faction fighting, and Gaelic games such as hurling. Church services were often conducted in the Irish language. The post-1815 economic collapse in Newfoundland after the Napoleonic Wars caused many of these Irish-speaking settlers to flee to the nearby Maritime colonies, taking their language with them. Court records show that defendants sometimes required Irish-speaking interpreters, as in the case of an Irishman in Fermeuse in 1752. Ecclesiastical records also illustrate the prevalence of Irish. In the mid-1760s the Reverend Laurence Coughlan, a Methodist preacher, converted most of the North Shore of Newfoundland to Protestantism. Observers credited the success of his evangelical revival at Carbonear and Harbour Grace to the fact that he was fluent in Irish. There are references to the need for Irish-speaking priests between 1784 and 1807. In letters to Dublin, the Catholic Bishop James Louis O'Donel, when requesting a Franciscan missionary for the parishes of St. Mary's and Trepassey, said that it was absolutely necessary that he should be able to speak Irish. O'Donel himself was an Irish speaker, and the fact that his successor Bishop Patrick Lambert (a Leinsterman and coadjutor bishop of St. John's from 1806) had no Irish may