“O happy sight”
26 July 2009
The backbone of the giant turtle of Newfoundland is the Highway. Highway One. To distinguish it from… there are no others. Smaller roads radiate off towards the edges of the turtle’s back – small fishing communities reeling from the fact that they can no longer fish. Some have turned to tourism, opening small museums about life ”in the old days” filled with ”really old stuff” usually dating from around 1960. The museums are staffed by school students, earning a few dollars in a holiday job.
They don’t know much about the exhibits, but are usually chatty and friendly, and offer up information about the village, and the fact that for the first time ever, their father has had to go to Alberta for the season to find work.
One such museum is in King’s Cove, near Bonavista, the supposed point where John Cabot first cried “O happy sight” in 1497. Possibly less to do with the actual place – it is flat and rocky and feels as if it is just about to succumb to the wind and the waves, but more to do with the fact that it wasn’t the vast, turbulent, semifrozen, foggy, storm-ridden Atlantic that has claimed so many seafaring lives. I visited a replica of his ship. It is about the size of a large living-room. In that, with no GPS, no maps, no Met Office Shipping News, he found the land of white gold.
I stayed in Bonavista, as it has the only hostel for 300km, but was actually trying to get to King’s Cove, where my great-uncle came out in the 1870s as an accountant in the cod trade.
I had minimal information on him. My aunt had done some research in the 80’s and found the location of King’s Cove and some of his letters to his brother back in England. I figured if I could just get to the village, take a few photos for Dad, get a feel of the place, then that would do me. Funny thing about Newfoundland, is it doesn’t let you just scrape the surface, it pulls you in.
To cut a long story short, I got a ride from the hostel owner to King’s Cove. En route we stopped at her aunt’s shop where a distant cousin of mine (it turns out) was shopping. He actually lives in Ontario, but was in King’s Cove that week on holiday. He told me who to go and see. I turned up on the doorstep of a small, white, wooden house and explained to the patient 70 year-old woman what I was looking for. She invited me in and proceeded to tell me that she had known my great-uncle and his daughter regularly used to come round and sit in that very living-room and gossip. She then took me round the cemeteries until we found the gravestones of all the family, then to my great-uncle’s old house, in the process of being renovated, showed me where the building stood in which he worked, and the Church he would have attended. She then invited me back to hers for “a cup of tea” which turned out to be a full baked Cod Dinner, and as I finally managed to extricate myself from the house with my grateful thanks for all her help, gave me a pair of hand-knitted woollen mittens as a gift. That’s Newfoundland.
I walked up towards the lighthouse, met the people I had met in the shop that morning who fed me some more and told me to look them up when I got to Toronto. I finally made it to the lighthouse and the spectacular rock formations that make up that part of the coastline, and was thinking how lucky I had been to find everything I had wanted to see when first a minke whale and then a humpback whale swam round the coastline not 40 metres below me. That’s Newfoundland.