BILL
GILBERT clambers up a steep slope covered
in springy heath and turns, gazing down at the tiny Newfoundland
harbour that once cradled Sea Forest Plantation. Along the cove
below, tiny spruce trees sprinkle the lowlands; rust-red heath
and low-bush blueberry carpet the rocky ground. Tidy houses,
each painted a fresh white, dot the harbour's edge. The water
shimmers like foil. Zipping up his polar fleece against the cold,
Gilbert surveys the little harbour where merchants sought their
fortunes nearly 400 years ago. "I think the brewhouse was
probably down around there somewhere," he says softly, pointing
to a small saltwater pond. "And they were building boats,
so there would have been some sort of shipyard or boatyard."
Founded in 1610, a decade before the Pilgrims
celebrated their first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Sea Forest Plantation,
also known as Cupers Cove, was Canada's first official English
colony. Financed by the London and Bristol Company, a small coterie
of merchants from England's two greatest ports, the fledgling
plantation became a small outpost in a wild land, the culmination
of more than a century of searching for new fishing grounds to
feed a hungry Europe. Long lost to time and memory in the modern
village of Cupids, tucked on the northern shore of the Avalon
Peninsula, the colony remained for centuries little more than
an entry in the history books. Two years ago, however, Gilbert
and his crew unearthed the first traces of its ruins: the corner
of a 17th-century wooden house complete with a massive stone
fireplace.
Over the past two summers, the unassuming
archeologist and his team of eight have exhumed thousands of
relics — pieces of early 17th-century smoking pipes, case bottles
(an early form of glass bottle made in England), ha ndmade
iron nails, trade beads and coarse English earthenware. While
the colonists at Cupers Cove experimented with mineral exploration,
fur trading, agriculture and sawmilling, their lives depended
on the harbour and the ocean beyond. "In order to survive
here," says Gilbert, "they really needed to fish."
But by the time these first settlers were
wandering the primeval forests of the coast, European ships had
been harvesting cod in the seas off Newfoundland for more than
a century. For decades, historians have suggested that Giovanni
Caboto, or John Cabot as he is now better known, stumbled on
the region's cod-rich waters 500 years ago this summer by accident
as he scoured the seas for a western route to Asia's spices,
teas and porcelains. Many researchers have also dismissed Newfoundland's
earliest colonies as dismal failures, suggesting they collapsed
within a few short years of their founding. Newfoundland, or
so the story went, remained the almost exclusive preserve of
Beothuk and Mi'Kmaq hunters and fleets of seasonal European fishers
until the 18th century.
In recent years, however, archeologists,
geographers and historians have uncovered a different tale. Poring
over documents in European archives and excavating early colonial
sites along Newfoundland's English Shore, they are exhuming new
evidence of pre-Cabot exploration and 17th-century settlement
in the North Atlantic. The history of the early fishing captains
of the North Atlantic, who were little interested in leaving
behind records of their voyages and routes for competitors to
read, is gradually being revealed. It is a tale woven from a
host of seemingly unrelated threads — the Catholic calendar
in medieval Europe, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the market
for olive oil in the Mediterranean, and the Spanish quest for
gold in the New World.
Far from being the first European to reach
North America, say researchers such as Newfoundland geographer
Gordon Handcock, Cabot likely sailed with some knowledge of the
New World gleaned from earlier English mariners. Moreover, while
the famous Italian navigator undertook his historic 1497 voyage
to scout a route to the wealth of Cathay and Cipango in Asia,
those financing both him and the first colonies of Newfoundland
sought something more essential to Europeans — new fishing grounds
to replace the overcrowded, some say exhausted, waters of Europe.
The early colonies that followed were successful, shaping Newfoundland
lives for generations. "The result of Cabot was the fishery,"
says Peter Pope, an archeologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland
in St. John's. "That's not what he intended, but that was
what happened."
top
SITTING IN A CROWDED CAFE a few blocks
from the harbour in St. John's, Pope downs the last of his cappuccino.
Clearly relishing his subject, he leans forward as he sums up
the historical prelude to Cabot's famous voyage. The author of
a forthcoming book, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot,
Pope points out that it was not the Italian mariner and his crew
but early Norse seafarers who were truly the first Europeans
to land in North America. Sailing westward from Viking settlements
in Iceland and Greenland, says Pope, the Norse crossed Davis
Strait in the 10th century, journeying down the coasts of Baffin
Island and Labrador before building a small outpost at the northern
tip of Newfoundland. Known today as L'Anse aux Meadows — and
discovered in 1960 by Norwegians Anne Stine Ingstad and Helge
Ingstad — the outpost, says Pope, thrived briefly before the
Norse retreated to Greenland.
But for centuries after, the North Atlantic
and its mysteries continued to beckon, thanks to a flourishing
European appetite for fish. Permitted by Rome in the eighth century
to dine on cod, salmon, herring and other fish on the fast days
that flecked the Christian calendar, Catholic Europe clamoured
for seafood.  To
satisfy this hunger and to round out fare in parts of Europe
poor in protein, local fishing fleets took to the water. Atlantic
cod soon became the fish of choice. With its firm flaky flesh
and low fat content it could be readily dried outdoors and stored
over the winter months for the 40 days of fasting at Lent. By
the 12th century, Norwegian villagers presided over a flourishing
international trade in dried cod known as stockfish.
Others soon followed. Fanning out from
the Barents Sea off northern Norway to the Bay of Biscay off
France, European fishers plumbed the shallow waters for the bottom-feeding
cod. Before long, says Pope, Europe's fleets were jostling for
the best spots. In the Irish Sea, Basque fishing boats took aim
at the English fleet. "The Basques had the bigger and better
armed ships," says Pope. Refusing to concede defeat, some
English vessels — particularly those from the western port of
Bristol — headed north to Iceland where cod was reputedly abundant
and Icelanders ill-equipped to defend their waters.
The English fleet began scouring Iceland's
inshore waters as early as 1408 or 1409. Alarmed by these invaders,
Icelandic chieftains soon complained to King Eirik, the monarch
of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, citing English greed and a disturbing
decline in the fishery. Whether the decline was the result of
a natural fluctuation in the stocks or overfishing inshore, it
is hard to say, notes Pope.
The sudden dearth of fish did not go unnoticed
by the English. It could have been then that a few crews began
scouting for richer waters to the west, says Kirsten Seaver,
an American historian and the author of The Frozen Echo: Greenland
and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500.
As proof, Seaver points to two intriguing archeological finds
in western Greenland. While excavating Gardar — the bishop's
seat in Greenland — some 70 years ago, archeologist Poul Norlund
discovered a small table knife identical to those adorning tables
in late 14th-century London. In addition, archeologists excavating
another large medieval Greenland farm, Hvalsey, unearthed a small
cross made of English pewter.
top
Such finds suggest that some English captains
called in along the western coast of Greenland, soon after the
large-scale English exploitation of the Icelandic fisheries began.
Once they had arrived in Greenland, says Kirsten Seaver, the
English lay just a short crossing away from Baffin Island. To
the Norwegian-born historian, it seems only logical that the
English soon took the same northern route to the New World first
discovered by early Norse seafarers. "There's really no
reason to suppose that there was anything to stop the English
once they had more familiarity with the bigger ships and more
familiarity with navigational hazards in the Atlantic,"
she notes.
Just where along the eastern coast of North
America the English explored remains unclear: archeologists working
on Baffin Island and in northern Labrador have never unearthed
any definite evidence of early English fishers. But word of a
new land to the west seems to have reached Bristol in the late
1470s, according to a contemporary account written by William
of Worcester and published in the late 18th century. In 1480,
for example, Bristol merchant John Jay outfitted at great expense
an 80-tonne ship for the island of Brazil, a name often given
in medieval European tales to a land far to the west of Ireland.
Setting sail in July from Bristol, Jay's ship voyaged west, intending
to "traverse the seas." But the journey ended in failure.
English crews, says Pope, had yet to master the new methods of
astronomical navigation devised in Portugal and Spain: open,
oceanic voyaging — as opposed to island hopping by way of Iceland
and Greenland — would have been a highly risky proposition.
Buffetted by storms, undoubtedly lost, Jay's ship returned home
empty-handed.
To find a direct route to the New World,
the Bristol interests needed a European navigator skilled in
the new techniques. They eventually located just the man — John
Cabot. Likely born near Naples around 1455, Cabot lived most
of his adult life in Venice and became a merchant in the lucrative
Mediterranean trade, journeying as far east as Alexandria in
Egypt. Convinced that the silks and porcelains of the East could
be had by voyaging to the west, he soon settled in Spain, knocking
on doors in Seville for financing. But Cabot was too late, notes
author Alan F. Williams in a new book, John Cabot and Newfoundland.
A compatriot, Christopher Columbus, had already begun lobbying
the Spanish crown for such a charter.
Undeterred, Cabot sought other backers.
Aware of Bristol enterprises in the North Atlantic, he moved
to England. There, he set to work mustering support for an exploratory
voyage along a northwest passage to Asia. "What Cabot was
interested in," says Pope, "was a comptoir, a trading
post. These were the kinds of things the Venetians and the Genoese
had all over the Mediterranean." Such a prospect would have
appealed strongly to mercantile interests in England. But the
canny Bristol shipowners may also have decided to kill two birds
with one stone. While searching for a northwest passage, Cabot
could also plot a route to the new land they had already stumbled
upon. "Cabot was capable of going to a place, knowing what
it was, putting it on a map and telling you how to get back to
it," says Pope.
top
Setting sail from Bristol in May 1497 with
a crew of about 20 and a charter from England's Henry VII, Cabot
struck out west. While researchers still debate exactly where
he made landfall in North America (a confusion arising largely
from the fact that Cabot's charts and logs, if they exist, have
never been found), most scholars now suggest he cruised Newfoundland's
northeastern coast and tasted fare from its rich fishing grounds.
Back in England, Cabot claimed to have discovered the Orient
and touted the gems and spices certain to be found a little farther
along the coast. His crew, however, was excited by a very different
treasure. "They declare that the sea there is full of fish
that can be taken not only with nets but with fishing-baskets,
a stone being placed in the basket to sink it in the water,"
wrote one contemporary observer, Raimondo di Soncino, in a letter
to the Duke of Milan. "And the said Englishmen, his [Cabot's]
partners, say that they can bring so many fish that this kingdom
will have no more business with Iceland, with which country it
has a very great trade in the fish called stock-fish."
SURROUNDED by precariously leaning piles
of papers and crates of dusty books and charts, Gordon Handcock
views a map of the Newfoundland coast. The son of a Bonavista
Bay fisher and an expert on the island's geography, the avuncular
researcher has spent decades studying the early cod fishery.
From the start, he explains, word of the newfound land's bounty
spread rapidly in Europe. By the 1520s, ships from Brittany,
Normandy, Portugal and England flocked to Newfoundland, dividing
up the best fishing grounds. While the Portuguese and English
gravitated to the Avalon Peninsula, French ships fished the shores
farther north, south and west. "If you look at the names
up and down the Avalon Peninsula there," says Handcock,
"Baccalieu, that's Portuguese, so is Cape St. Francis, Cape
Spear. So the Portuguese obviously had tenure off the southeastern
coast."
Unable to negotiate Newfoundland's icebound
waters in winter, the ships slipped into a seasonal rhythm, heading
out from their home ports each March or April. Arriving some
four weeks later, crews spent their summers fishing. As ships
discovered the rich offshore banks after 1540, Portuguese, French
and then Spanish ships began processing and curing their catch
at sea by a method known as wet bulk — ample supplies of salt
were poured over the layers of fresh fish in the holds. Some
crews rarely stepped foot ashore. "They only used the harbours
very sparingly for refuge and water and perhaps a bit of wood,"
says Handcock.
The English, however, had no such advantage.
Lacking an abundant and cheap supply of salt at home, they were
forced to adopt a more terrestrial method of curing their catch,
combining drying and salting. Wooden stages and drying platforms
known as flakes were built on their arrival in spring. Crews
would then tend the catch ashore, turning the heavy fish, which
average three to four kilograms, until they were properly dried
and covering them when it rained. The process produced a superior
cure. "Lightly salted dried cod was a source of protein
second to none," says Handcock. "It was far more valuable
and commanded a higher price than wet bulk or green fish."
But supplies of salted dried cod, at least
at first, were lamentably small. As a minor European power in
the mid-16th century, England was unable to wrest control of
the Newfoundland fishery. Given the labyrinthine world of European
politics, however, English merchants did not have long to wait.
In 1581 Spain and Portugal united under one rule; seven years
later, the Spanish Armada — including most of Spain's fishing
boats — was destroyed attempting to invade England. Unopposed
and unhindered, English ships began to dominate the harbours
of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula.
Bristol merchants rubbed their hands in
glee. Heading to Newfoundland in record numbers, crews from England's
West Country began delivering to market thousands of tonnes of
lightly salted cod. In southern Europe, victuallers, who supplied
food and other provisions to ships, clamoured for English cod.
Lightly salted dried cod resisted rot for years — even in tropical
climates — making it an ideal lightweight naval ration. Intent
on conquering Central and South America and ransacking its lands
for gold, the Spanish navy depended on English dried fish. "Cod
from Newfoundland was the lever by which [England] wrested her
share of the riches of the New World from Spain," noted
historian Harold Innes in his classic 1940 study, The Cod
Fisheries.
top
Eyeing the fortunes to be made from the
New World, merchants lined up to invest their capital in places
like Cupers Cove.
BATHED IN THE SOFT LIGHT of the former
schoolhouse in Cupids, Bill Gilbert unwraps some of the nearly
400-year-old debris discovered inside a planter's home. O pening boxes and gently removing
tissue paper, he holds up tiny shards of West Country earthenware
— black, yellow, mossy green — for inspection. Turning one
partially reconstructed pot in his hand, Gilbert points out the
thumbprints of a 17th-century potter along the rim and the sturdy
design that marks it as a storage jar from Britain's West Country.
With its glazed interior, he explains, such a pot may have once
stored a precious liquid, perhaps olive oil from the Mediterranean's
shady groves.
Thousands of kilometres from Europe's shores,
Newfoundland stood at the corner of a lucrative triangle. Crews
filled their holds with Newfoundland cod in the late summer,
then set sail for southern Spain, Portugal and Italy to trade
their cargo for southern luxuries — olive oil, fine wines, dates,
raisins, marmalade and other delicacies, which would soon be
carried to English ports. In good years, the merchants who owned
the ships stood to make a small fortune. "But it was very
speculative," says Handcock, "like investing in modern-day
mines." Much depended on matters beyond the investors' control
— brushes with pirates, encounters with fierce storms and the
vagaries of the Mediterranean olive crop. (Olives were a critical
source of protein in southern Europe. If the year's crop proved
bountiful, cod prices plummeted.) "The merchants used the
term 'adventurer,'" adds Handcock. "I think that was
because it established the right degree of risk-taking."
At Cupers Cove, the costs of building and
provisioning a settlement and shuttling people and products to
Europe soon outweighed profits. Around 1620, the company backers
— a select group of merchants and gentry — apparently lost
interest. Correspondence, once lively between the colony and
the mother country, tapered off and died — leading most historians
to assume that the plantation had been abandoned.
But when Gilbert and his archeological
crew began their excavations, they discovered the historians
had been wrong. The artifacts revealed that people had inhabited
Cupers Cove throughout the 17th century and likely into modern
times — long after financial assistance from England dried up.
A similar continuity characterizes another 17th-century English
plantation currently under excavation at Ferryland, 72 kilometres
south of St. John's. "So there is a core population here
in Newfoundland that can trace its ancestry until the early 17th
century," says Gilbert.
For Cupids, the community of 800 that now
stands on the site of Cupers Cove, the discovery has become a
point of pride. "I suppose the archeological dig has reawakened
the community to the importance of the site as the first English
settlement," says Roy Dawe, a founder of the Cupids Historical
Society. "And it has confirmed our suspicions that there
was continuous settlement."
Fishing and selling dried catch to seasonal
transport vessels, the residents of Cupers Cove and other early
colonies built a new life in a new land. For centuries, cod ruled
over all. "You couldn't build the flakes very far away from
shore," says Handcock, "because the salt fish were
very, very heavy. So there was a tremendous tendency to take
the good harbours and develop them." As the little coves
closest to the fishing grounds filled with stages and drying
platforms, the following generations of Newfoundlanders spread
out to the next closest harbours. In time, Newfoundland boasted
hundreds of small communities sprinkled along the coast. "What
we have here today," says Handcock, "is a legacy of
having to find fish and having to find places to process it."
In the nascent outports, Newfoundland's
enduring character was forged. Never much oriented towards land,
these early colonists gazed firmly toward the sea. Spread out
thinly over a rugged coast, they practised the virtues of self-sufficiency
— building their own homes and boats and villages. Preserving
their own folklore and dialects, creating their own music —
all strongly influenced by the Celtic and West Country traditions
that they carried with them from the Old World — they created
a culture unlike any other in North America, one rooted deeply
in the 17th century. In the end, the great fishery that Cabot,
celebrated navigator and Newfoundland folk hero, almost ignored
in his quest for a route to Asia, shaped nearly every aspect
of life in Newfoundland.
Heather Pringle is a writer in Vancouver
and the author of In
Search of Ancient North America: An Archaeological Journey to Forgotten Cultures.
top
Photo credits: (TOP) Memorial University archeologist, Bill Gilbert,
by Ned Pratt; (MIDDLE) Cod drying outside in Ferryland in 1938,
from the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador/VA6-75;
(BOTTOM) The community of Cupids, Nfld., in 1897 (formerly Cupers
Cove, England's first Canadian colony, established in 1610),
by Robert John Smith/courtesy of Alton Smith.
|
