Cod industry cheers up the sad face of a Newfie winter

Press, 24 April 1987, Page 34

Cod industry cheers up the sad face of a Newfie winter

By

BORIS WEINTRAUB,

National ueograpmc ivews service

“From the middest of October to the middest of May, there is a sad face of winter upon all this land,” wrote George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, to King Charles I in 1629. He was asking to be permitted to give up his settlement in Ferryland, Newfoundland. Now, more than centuries later, a shivering group of men stand on a headland jutting into the Atlantic. A raging wind and slanting rain make them thoroughly uncomfortable as they watch two divers at work in the harbour below, seeking archaeological evidence of the settlement. It raises the question of why anyone would have wanted to leave the relative comfort of seventeenth century England to live in such a forbidding place. The answer was cod. That plentiful and profitable fish has kept at least a few residents in Ferryland from 1621 until today — there are now about 700 — and making this one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities of English origin in the New World. At the time Calvert sent the first 12 settlers here, under Captain Edward Wynne, Europeans had been coming to Newfoundland for more than a century to harvest Cod from one of the world’s most bountiful fisheries. Because of fish, there have always been settlers at Ferryland, even after Calvert shifted to the future Maryland’s warmer climate and even after the Dutch sacked and burned Ferryland in 1673. And so, buried beneath centuries of sediment in the harbour, lies an archaeological time capsule showing how life has been lived here for 365 years. In search of that elusive record is a team of archaeologists headed by James Tuck of Newfoundland’s Memorial University and supported by the National Geographic Society. The of settle-

ments was a means of exerting greater English control over Newfoundland and of making the cod fishery more efficient by having men and fish-processing operations in place when English fishing boats first were able to cross the Atlantic again round “the middest of May.” Commercial interests made several attempts to finance settlements, mostly on the Avalon Peninsula, which hangs off the south-eastern cost of the island. Like the other settlements. Ferryland met with initial success, aided by an atypically mild winter that encouraged the settlers. At its seventeenth century peak, Ferryland had more than 100 residents. Calvert himself paid a visit in 1627 — unusual for a lord — then returned with his wife and children to spend the winter of 1628-29. It was this experience of the harsh winter that led Calvert to petition his king for release from the colony and, in its place, for land in "your majesty’s dominion of Virginia.” Tuck and his scientific team began their efforts part-time in 1984, digging their .trenches in an area suggesed by letters from Wynne and his fellow colonists. In a few days they uncovered seventeenth century materials, and in 1985 located the forge that had served the colony in its early days. • Six weeks of work this year has uncovered both the stone walls and slate floor of another seventeenth century building and signs of contact between settlers and Newfoundland’s Beothuk Indians. “This is going to be a major site, requiring years of excavation and study,” Tuck says. “So far, our major has been just £ determining

where the earliest settlement was.” The site is enormously productive. “You can’t dig a hole without finding something,” Tuck adds. Even a walk along the water’s edge discloses bits of seventeenth and eighteenth century pottery and glass lying on the rocks. Unlike the places where other nearly contemporary colonies, such as Martin’s Hundred in Virginia, St Mary’s City in Maryland, and Plymouth in Massachusetts, were built, Ferryland’s steep hills made it impossible to lay out a “proper” English village, Tuck says. He hopes to compare Ferryland to settlements such as those, and to New England forts and Labrador whaling stations. One of the more interesting finds so far is a gold-plated iron cross, a religious artefact that no expert has yet been able 1 to identify. It raises all sorts of questions about who brought it to the New World and why. Both Catholics and Protestants were present in Ferryland, unusual in the highly charged religious climate of the time. But Calvert announced in the mid-1620s that he was a Catholic, and his colony accepted Catholics as well as Protestants. Whatever its significance, the cross is testimony to the long use of Ferryland — a use that continues today. As Tuck’s seven crew members dig and the divers work 15 feet down in the harbour, fishing boats manned by residents of nearby houses arrive with their catch. Seagulls screech overhead, the wind continues to howl, the rain to fall. It must not have been all that different in the middest of October almost four centuries ago, when the saddest face of winter began to tt P°°