CHAPTER III—NEWFOUNDLAND
"Such are the charms to barren states assyn'd,
Their wants but few, their wishes all confin'd."
Our first possession across the sea was Newfoundland, and I made the voyage to it 400 years after John Cabot, the discoverer. The Mathew of Bristol first sighted Cape Bonavista, which was the first point seen by the Aurora. Cabot was a Venetian sailing out of Bristol for a time, and for his great discovery, which gave England her vast American possessions, King Henry gave John ten pounds a year. Cabot is to-day very well thought of, but nothing much is known of what became of him. The name makes an attractive one for a Newfoundland dog. I have known several of them bear it, and it is a sort of geographical education to have them running around; but there is not any place of importance in the world called after this great mariner.
The coast of the country is forbidding, being rocky and bleak, except around some of the bays; the most beautiful of those seen by me being Bay of Islands on the west coast, which reminds one of Norway. Here and in the valley of the Humber, which runs into it, there is some very fertile land, and there are some scenes of peace and prosperity. But the general impression I have obtained after several visits to the country, is that life is a struggle for many of the inhabitants compared with what it is in any other colony which we possess. Newfoundlanders are true to the land of their birth, but one familiar with North America at large would never think of advising a colonist to push his fortune in this particular part of it, because the opportunities are comparatively few and the winters are too long for any working man to remain idle. In the interior the soil is as a rule shallow; there are thousands and thousands of acres of barrens, hundreds of lakes of different sizes and numbers of streams. Great areas of the country are grown over with small timber, the trees being so close together in places that one can hardly push through them. Much of the barren country is moss-grown and boggy, so that it cannot be travelled over by horses or mules; therefore, when one leaves the rivers, it is necessary to carry everything on one's back, and, as a result, travel in the interior is not much indulged in by the inhabitants. To add to the pleasure, mosquitoes and their cousins, the black flies, are in swarms. The whole interior is a deer forest of the first magnitude, teeming with caribou (Rangi-fer tarandus). These animals weigh about 300 pounds, and they are very gray about the head and shoulders. I have seen them standing among trees which were grown over with bearded moss, when it was difficult to tell the caribou from the trees. Some of the heads are splendid with a great deal of palmation and not at all like Greenland or polar American caribou in which the palmation is generally poor and the beam long and straggling, probably due to a difference of environment. Migrating to the northern part of the island in summer, they return in September and October to winter in the south, and the sportsman intercepting them on their autumnal trip can have his choice of heads.
Another attraction is the salmon and trout fishing. The rivers, especially on the west coast, are well stocked, white trout being particularly numerous.
St. John's harbor is entered through the narrows. On the left, going in, there is the lighthouse; and on the right, or north side, the signal station. On this side is the city, lying at the foot of low hills, its principal street, Water Street, being parallel with the shore. From it run side streets down to the wharves and up the hill to the residences and churches. The Dundee ships lay on the south side, our yard being nearest the narrows. From it a path led out to the lighthouse point. A hundred yards from the ship one was on the hillside and without the pale of everything, because only a narrow fringe of buildings separated the south shore from the wilds. Along the water edge, between our ship and the lighthouse, one passed lots of fish flakes. These were constructed of a framework of vertical and horizontal poles covered over with spruce boughs upon which the split codfish were laid after being salted. The air circulated under and around them well and they soon dried. I saw codfish being dried on the beach in Shetland, but they were only spread on the shingle. There are no trees in Shetland from which poles could be made, but there is less precipitation there than in Newfoundland, so the fish dry well upon the shingle. It is over 300 years since the Newfoundland fisheries began to be worked. They proved the country's first attraction and there is nothing of the sort in the world like them. For the five years 1871 to '75 the export of dried cod was 1,333,009 quintals of 112 pounds. The Basques first appeared on the scene and a port on the west coast to-day bears their name, Port aux Basques. As early as 1527 an English shipmaster, on entering St. John's harbor, found eleven ships from Norway, one from Breton and ten from Portugal, all fishing.
In looking over the exports for 1881 one notices several interesting items; one is, 4,127 tons of cod-liver oil, another item is 300 barrels of cods' heads at $1.00 per barrel. I fancy, however, their use has not become very general yet when we know that only 300 barrels were exported, and that over sixty million cod were killed. When I speak of the cod fishing, I mean the Labrador as well as the Banks fishery. In fact, the former is probably the more fished of the two by the Newfoundlanders.