The inhospitable interior and the fertile ocean kept the first
European settlers on Newfoundland - most of English and
Irish extraction - glued to the coast when they founded the
outports during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though
they hunted seals on the winter pack ice for meat, oil and
fur, they were chiefly dependent on the codfish of the Grand
Banks , whose shallow waters, concentrated to the south and
east of the island, constituted the richest fishing grounds in the
world. It was a singularly harsh life, prey to vicious storms,
dense fogs and the whims of the barter system operated by the
island's merchants, who exercised total control of the trade price
of fish until the 1940s in some areas.
To combat the consequent emigration , various populist
premiers have attempted to widen the island's economic base,
sometimes with laughable ineptitude - as in the case of a proposed
rubber factory, sited ludicrously far from the source of its raw
materials. Furthermore, efforts to conserve the fisheries,
primarily by extending Canada's territorial waters to two hundred
nautical miles in 1977, have failed to reverse the downward spiral,
and the overfished Grand Banks are unable to provide a livelihood
for all the reliant Newfoundlanders. The federal government in
Ottawa spent $39 million bailing out the Atlantic fishery in 1992
alone, but there is one bright spot - profits from the offshore
Hibernia gas and oil field, which was completed in 1997 and
produces about 125,000 barrels of oil daily, have slowly begun to
transform the economy.
Home to lively St John's and a sprawl of ribbon villages,
the Avalon Peninsula is easily the most populated portion of
Newfoundland, but here, as elsewhere, it's the rocky, craggy coast
that makes a lasting impression - no less than 10,000km of island
shoreline, dotted with the occasional higgledy-piggledy fishing
village of which Trinity and Grand Bank are the most
diverting, especially if the weather holds: even in summer,
Newfoundland can be wet and foggy.
To get anything like the best from this terrain you need a car,
for Newfoundland's public transport is thin on the ground.
There are no trains and only one daily long-distance bus, DRL
Coachlines, which travels the length of the Trans-Canada.
Elsewhere, Viking Express runs a limited service from Corner Brook
to St Anthony, at the top of the Northern Peninsula, and a number
of minibus companies connect St John's with various
destinations, principally Argentia for the Nova Scotia ferry and
Fortune for the boat to St-Pierre et Miquelon .