Beginnings of the History:

Newfoundland is approximately forty-three thousand square miles and consists of wilderness of rugged mountain ranges, desolate barrens, scrub forests, stunning fiords, tremendous rivers, unnamed ponds, impassable bogs and has more than six thousand miles of coastline.

To the north, across the narrow Strait of Belle Isle, is Labrador, a windfall of the 1927 ruling by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London that awarded the disputed area to the Dominion of Newfoundland rather than to Canada. Part of mainland North America, it is roughly three times the size of the island and its spectacular coastal regions are the geological cousins of what Newfoundland's first premier under Confederation, Joey Smallwood, called his "poor, bald rock."

The early history of Newfoundland is a compound of legend and fact; and in the absence of documentary evidence what we call fact is often no more than a presumably logical conclusion based on all-too-insufficient premises or supposition.

The sagas of the Norsemen lead us to believe that having discovered and colonized first Iceland, later the southern portion of Greenland, they ventured farther south in their small boats to discover the coast of Labrador and even that of Newfoundland. These Norsemen were bold navigators and it is conceivable that they did venture south as far as the Northern part of Newfoundland.

For thousands of years, the inhabitants here were a mixture of nomadic native peoples, migrant Indians, from the east coast of the continent; first, Dorset Eskimos; later Inuit from Alaska; and then the descendant of the Maritime Archaic people, the Naskapi-Montagnais tribe, who still inhabit the interior of Labrador. They built distinctive cultures around fishing, hunting and foraging, according to the territory they had staked out and the seasonal food supplies at hand; fish, fowl, seal and caribou. But when the first marauding Europeans landed their boats on Newfoundland's northern shores, the clock began running for the island's Native population.

The initial contact may have come around 1000 A.D. with the landing of the Norsemen at a site believed to be L'Anse aux Meadows at Epaves Bay on the Great Northern Peninsula. The fragments of their colony, including a Norse spindle whorl, suggesting that women were present in the ancient camp, were discovered in 1960. Like most early pioneering efforts in Newfoundland, Thorfinn Karlsefini's attempt to colonize "Vineland" was abandoned after three dreary winters - grinding seasons of snow, ice and incessant gales whose wretchedness was not improved by the attacks of the hostile Native population.

It seems that by about 1300 the links between Scandinavia and the New World had been severed completely, and for 200 years Europe forgot about the New World while she engaged in unceasing internal warfare and conflict. However, in the second half of the fifteenth century the Portuguese and Spanish began to send ships and navigators far out into the seas around Africa to the Far East and across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and South America. At the same time someone - we are no longer certain who - rediscovered the routes to Newfoundland, and noted abundant fishery on the Grand Banks. Traditionally, we understand that the Island was rediscovered by John Cabot in 1497, but there is increasing evidence to show that others may have been here before him because they are said to have met Basque speaking people already there. Ships from Bristol in England, the port from which Cabot sailed, may have visited Newfoundland as early as 1480, and the Portuguese claim that their fishermen were here even before then. This is certainly possible since at that time the nations of Western Europe carried on large fisheries off Iceland and the west coast of Ireland. If they fished in these waters during the spring of the year, the prevailing easterly winds could quite easily have blow a stray fishing boat right across the Atlantic until it reached the Grand Banks.

In spite of this reprieve from the jarring impact of European civilization, the island was ultimately doomed; five hundred years after the failure of the Norse settlement, the Old and New Worlds met again on the voyage of a Venetian adventurer out to extend the empires of his patron, Henry VII of England. In the year 1497 Newfoundland was about to experience the first wave of outsiders who would set out to commercially exploit "the silver mine of the Atlantic": a fishery that was nothing short of fabulous.

For even more Newfoundland history, check out the Newfoundland links.

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