The Speares

Today we're heading to Harbour Grace. But since this is the first flight of our cross-country adventure, we've got to start somewhere. And like most adventures in Newfoundland, the place to start is St. John's. And in some accounts, St. John's begins with Zuan Caboto.

Zuan was a venetian explorer. On the feast day of St John the Baptist, 24 June 1494, he sailed into a sheltered harbour on the south-eastern coast of a new land with his son, Sebastian. The new land was provisionally called Prima Terra Vista and the harbour was named St. John's in honour of the holiday on which it was discovered. Since they were operating on their own, and not under some patron's flag, they didn't lay claim to any of the new lands. They didn't really even explore, staying within a crossbow shot of the ship at all times, and mostly going ashore to get fresh water. They considered it a "a very sterile land, [although] there are a lot of white bears and very big deer ... as well there are infinite fish ... most of them are called cod." As for people, in one account they only ever saw indirect evidence, old cook fires and such, but another account talks of the people who "wander wearing animal furs. They use bow and arrow to fight...". And so the New Founde Lande, and its harbour of St. John's, was discovered, but not claimed, in 1494 by the Cabots. Or so the story goes.

Except that Zuan was in Seville at the time avoiding creditors and doing odd jobs to keep himself and his young family, including ten year old Sebastian, eating. He was something of an engineer, and proposed to the town council a design for a new bridge over the Guadalquivir river. He worked on this bridge for five months until the project was abandoned for some reason, which put Zuan out of work. He tried to get patronage from both Spain and Portugal for a voyage of disovery but that didn't go so well, and he found himself in England by the summer of 1495.

The 1494 story of the voyage to the new land was related by Sebastian himself many years later when he worked for Charles V of Spain. One of his tasks at that time was to accurately map the demarcation line of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which split up the entire world, minus Europe, between Spain and Portugal. The treaty had been signed on June 6th, 1494. So by having the first Cabot expedition happen two years before England was involved, and yet a couple of weeks after everything had been claimed by Portugal and Spain, there were no issues over the Tordesillas land claims.

The English version of the story differs on a few points. Firstly, Zuan was in fact John Cabot who had received a royal patent (patronage) to embark on a voyage of discovery largely in an effort to annoy the Portuguese and the Spanish. So in 1496, the Cabots sailed from Bristol looking for Brasil, the legendary island to the west of Ireland that remains permanently cloaked in fog except for one day in every seven years. They did not find the island; in fact they ran out of supplies and there was some form of mutiny. So they returned to Bristol and tried again in 1497. This time they were successful; they found an island to the west of Ireland, and indeed it was cloaked in fog a lot of the time due to the presence of iceburgs. So on the 24th of June, 1497, the feast day of St. John, the Cabots sailed into a natural harbour in the New Founde Lande and discovered a bustling seasonal fishing camp used by the Basques and Portuguese and named São João. Which, oddly enough, means St. John's.

The reason there was so much fishing activity in St. John's was the proximity of the Grand Banks - a series of underwater plateaus on the North American continental shelf. The sea can be as shallow as fifteen meters here, which forces nutrients from the depths upwards as they travel along the competing Labrador Current and Gulf Stream. This made the area rich in seafood such as Atlantic cod, swordfish, haddock, capelin, scallops, lobsters, seals and whales. And so, lots of people had an interest in St. John's.

By about 1630 the English had been controlling the east coast of what would become Newfoundland on and off since 1583, and mostly on since 1620. A permanent settlement was established and the seasonal fishing camp of St. John's became the town of St. John's, thereby making it the oldest town in North America by some peoples' reconning. Though others consider that San Juan, Santo Domingo, Tenochtitlan, Acoma Pueblo, Oraibi, Antiguo Cuscatlán, Motul, Cholula and Tepoztlán all predate St. John's, that last one by possibly three thousand years. In any event, St. John's became an actual town in 1630. And after that, things were pretty quiet for almost thirty-five years.

In 1665 St. John's was seized by the Dutch. The English managed to get it back but it was clear the defenses needed some work. When the Dutch returned in 1673, their three warships found the harbour being defended by only one English ship, the Elias Andrews, and it was a merchant vessel at that. But the captain had offloaded six guns and made an earthen fortification for them at the narrows guarding the harbour. With that shore battery and the one ship defending it the Dutch couldn't take the harbour.

The defense at the narrows was so successful that the decision was made to expand these temporary fortifications into Fort William. Unfortunately, the planning phase never really became the actual building phase, and the French showed up in 1696 and took over. When the British arrived to kick out the French the whole place was rubble. And the French didn't remain kicked out. They showed up again in 1705, 1708 and 1762, ownership of the town and its harbour changing hands and changing back again with each arrival. Finally, in the Battle of Signal Hill, the British won a decisive victory and then immediately built Fort Amherst and Fort Waldegrave at the narrows to defend the harbour entrance. Things in St. John's were pretty quiet after that for almost fifty-four years.

The homes of honest, hard-working but ultimately poor fisher folk tended to be of a somewhat rustic construction, and all wood of course. And St. John's has some hilly streets. And the winds on the rock can be biblical. So fires are bad news. The town of St. John's was almost completely destroyed by fire in 1816, twice in 1817, then again in 1819, 1846 and the worst one, the Great Fire of 1892. Any old buildings in St. John's today will date from 1892 for the most part, although the Anderson house, built in 1804, has survived all of the fires (at least its foundation has).

1901 saw the advent of radio in St. John's. Guglielmo Marconi had been pioneering wireless telegraphy with a view to competing with the undersea cable links between North America and Britain. There were stations in Britain at Poldhu, Cornwall and another at Clifden, Ireland, with a repeater station in between at County Wexford. On 12 December Marconi managed to pick up a transmission from these far off stations in the U.K. - a repeating series of three clicks in an ocean of static - at the impossible distance of 2,200 miles away on Signal Hill, just outside St. John's. He was using five hundred feet of wire attached to a kite for the antenna. He was also doing it during the day at what is today considered to be a medium wavelength, which happens to be one of the sun's favoured wavelengths. Marconi would later discover that signal hill was perhaps more telepathy than telegraphy but it still made for a good story. Another good story is that later, in 1912, Marconi was to be on the Titanic for a trip back here, being offered free passage because his company was supplying the radios and operators which would famously try out the new SOS signal. But he opted for the Lusitania instead as it had an earlier schedule.

Due to the proximity of St. John's to Cape Spear, the easternmost point of land in North America, it has always been important in transatlantic travels. In 1919 the War to End All Wars had itself ended, leaving a bunch of surplus bombers that would never be needed again. So John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew a surplus Vickers Vimy bomber from Lester's Field, outside St. John's, to crash in Derrygilmlagh Bog outside Clifden, County Galway, Ireland. It wasn't much of a crash, though, and technically they were the first people to fly across the Atlantic, so they were awarded ten thousand pounds from the Daily Mail (presented by none other than a young Winston Churchill), two thousand guineas from a tobacco company, a further one thousand pounds from a shipping magnate and a knighthood from King George V. Things in St. John's were pretty quiet after that for almost seventy years.

In the last half of the 1900s, the cod, the entire reason for St. John's existence for five hundred years, were in a decline. Since the larger fish were being fished out, the obvious solution was to use a smaller mesh on your nets and catch the smaller fish. Northern Cod stocks on the Grand Banks dropped by 93 percent over the course of thirty years from 1962 to 1992. And so on July 2 of that year there was a moratorium put on cod fishing within two hundred miles of Canada. It was meant to be in place for two years but remains to this day, although there has been a "stewardship fishery" since 2006. The loss of the cod fishery had a devastating effect on the Newfoundland economy generally, and the St. John's economy in particular. This was partially offset by the discovery, in 1979, of large amounts of oil in the Hibernia oil fields some three hundred kilometers offshore.

St. John's has been largely defined by its being a large and safe natural harbour on the stormy North Atlantic. But not so very far to the northwest of St. John's you will find Conception Bay, somewhat sheltered from the storms and home to several other ports. Also home to giant squid and even Nazi U-Boats, but we'll save those for another day.

In 1501, the Portugese Corte-Real brothers explored the bay northwest of what would become St. John's naming it Baía da Conceição. They, of course, claimed it for Portugal. But by 1517 the French moved in, creating the seasonal fishing community of Havre de Grâce on the western shore of the bay. In 1583 Robert Tossey of Dartmouth decided to overwinter there making the now Harbour Grace one of the earliest English-speaking permanent settlements in North America. So when the Happy Adventure was in search of a home port, Harbour Grace was the obvious choice.

The Adventure was captained by the scot Peter Easton, who was the original Most Notorious Pyrate, a good hundred years before Cap'n Teach terrorized the West Indies as Blackbeard. Easton started his life of crime as a privateer, a sort of sea-faring mercenary for Elizabeth I of England, with a commision to protect the English fishing fleets in and around St. John's. He was legally entitled to press-gang anyone into his service, and to attack at will any non-English interests, especially if they were Spanish.

But in 1604, Elizabeth was succeeded by James I, who sued for peace with Spain and cancelled all letters of marque. This didn't faze Peter one whit. He carried on as before, only now English ships were also fair game - although he didn't take them as prizes, he merely demanded protection money from them. Which they all happily paid. They actually needed protection, as did the neighbouring community of Cuper's Cove, and its resident Proprietary Governor of Newfoundland Colony, John Guy.

A growing fleet and a growing number of conscripts meant that Peter's raids had to become more profitable. He started raiding English ships too, on one particular raid sailing into St. John's harbour and plundering thirty of them. After this raid Peter's story leaves Newfoundland bound for the Azores, and Harbour Grace lost its protection, surviving an attack by the French. Still its population swelled until there were a few dozen permanent residents, and several hundred during fishing season. And one author, Robert Hayman, who wrote the first book written in the New World.

So welcome to Harbour Grace!

Home | Stories | Flights | Recipes | Camping | Login | Contact