The inhospitable interior and the
fertile ocean kept the first
European settlers on
Newfoundland
- most of English and Irish
extraction - glued to the coast when
they founded the outports during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Though they hunted
seals on
the winter pack ice for meat, oil
and fur, they were chiefly dependent
on the codfish of the
Grand Banks
, whose shallow waters, concentrated
to the south and east of the island,
constituted the richest fishing
grounds in the world. It was a
singularly harsh life, prey to
vicious storms, dense fogs and the
whims of the barter system operated
by the island's merchants, who
exercised total control of the trade
price of fish until the 1940s in
some areas.
To combat the consequent emigration, various populist premiers have
attempted to widen the island's
economic base, sometimes with
laughable ineptitude - as in the
case of a proposed rubber factory,
sited ludicrously far from the
source of its raw materials.
Furthermore, efforts to conserve the
fisheries, primarily by extending
Canada's territorial waters to two
hundred nautical miles in 1977, have
failed to reverse the downward
spiral, and the overfished Grand
Banks are unable to provide a
livelihood for all the reliant
Newfoundlanders. The federal
government in Ottawa spent $39
million bailing out the Atlantic
fishery in 1992 alone, but there is
one bright spot - profits from the
offshore Hibernia gas and oil field,
which was completed in 1997 and
produces about 125,000 barrels of
oil daily, have slowly begun to
transform the economy.
Home to lively St John's
and a sprawl of ribbon villages, the
Avalon Peninsula is easily
the most populated portion of
Newfoundland, but here, as
elsewhere, it's the rocky, craggy
coast that makes a lasting
impression - no less than 10,000km
of island shoreline, dotted with the
occasional higgledy-piggledy fishing
village of which Trinity and Grand
Bank are the most diverting,
especially if the weather holds:
even in summer, Newfoundland can be
wet and foggy.
To get anything like the best
from this terrain you need a car,
for Newfoundland's public
transport is thin on the ground.
There are no trains and only one
daily long-distance bus, DRL
Coachlines, which travels the length
of the Trans-Canada. Elsewhere,
Viking Express runs a limited
service from Corner Brook to St
Anthony, at the top of the Northern
Peninsula, and a number of minibus
companies connect St John's with
various destinations, principally
Argentia for the Nova Scotia ferry
and Fortune for the boat to St-Pierre
et Miquelon.
