After the Gold Rush

Bonavista, Newfoundland. Fall. What no one prepares you for is the beauty. Along the peninsula, the road winds through fishing settlements known as outports. As I turn off the highway onto the coast road, the sun breaks through a stormy sky making the squat orange maples and yellow birch glow against the wind-stunted fir and spruce. Seawards, in the bays between the rocky promontories, stand wooden stages or flakes, where cod used to be dried. These look like the remnants of a gold rush, which in a sense is what they are: relics of a gold rush that lasted 500 years.

In Abbotts’ B&B on Capeshore Road home-made sheets of tourist information tell how John Cabot discovered the cape in 1497. Cabot, a Venetian whose name was anglicised to reflect the national significance of his mission, was trying to find a western passage to Asia for Henry VII. What Cabot actually found was a landfall on which Britain’s claim to North America was based, and, as luck would have it, the world’s largest population of cod: a population so plentiful the fish could be caught by lowering a basket from a ship’s deck.

The typed sheets in Abbott’s tell you that the Bonavista peninsula is windy all year...

To view the rest of this article - you must be a paying subscriber and Login