IN THE late summer of 1629, an embittered English courtier sat at his desk and penned a letter to King Charles I detailing the loss of his hopes in the New World. Sir George Calvert had sunk a fortune in the small Newfoundland colony of Avalon, one of the earliest English settlements in North America. Eager to find an overseas refuge for his fellow Catholics, Calvert had transplanted his family from England to the mansion house in Avalon the previous year.
But the remote colony soon proved too wild, too cold, too inhospitable for the nobleman. “From the middest of October, to the middest of May,” he confided in his letter, explaining his decision to abandon the settlement, “there is a sadd face of wynter vpon all this land, both sea and land so frozen for the greatest part of the tyme as they are not penetrable …”
A stubborn man, Calvert began searching elsewhere for land – along gentler coasts to the south. Avalon, together with several other British colonies in Newfoundland, slipped into historical obscurity, forgotten by all but local residents and a handful of archivists. Even the ruins had disappeared.
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Little England?
In recent months, however, archaeologists have begun uncovering this intriguing part of colonial history. Just an hour’s drive west from the Newfoundland capital, St John’s, archaeologist William Gilbert and his team from the Baccalieu Trail Heritage Corporation, a non-profit-making organisation based in Carbonear, have discovered Cupids Cove, the second oldest official English colony in North America.
And along the southeastern coast of the province, James Tuck, head of the archaeology unit at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John’s, has unearthed the elaborate masonry of Avalon – every bit the Old World village that Calvert had planned.
Historians and archaeologists have long wondered what life was like in the first English outposts, how well-built the settlements were and how inhabitants interacted with the continent’s indigenous people. But definitive answers have been slow in coming: it is only recently, for example, that archaeologists began searching for ruins of the oldest permanent English settlement in North America – a fort at Jamestown, Virginia, established in 1607. So the Newfoundland research is a big plus. “I think we’re going to learn a tremendous amount about the people who tried to transplant England into the New World,” says Tuck.
Avalon, believes Tuck, was no 17th-century dreamer’s folly: there were good reasons why it was there. Lying along the eastern coast of Newfoundland, the village’s rocky shores bordered one of the world’s richest fishing grounds, and by the early 16th century, English fishing boats flocked to Newfoundland waters each summer to catch their fill of cod. Confident that exports of dried and salted fish could support a colony, Calvert dispatched the first shipload of settlers to Avalon in 1621. But records of the colony and its development, says Tuck, were scarce. “The historical documents pretty well quit after 1622.”
The early records, however, clearly located the colony in a place known to 16th century European fishermen as Farilham or Ferryland and shown on one of the Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazano’s maps as early as the 1520s. Homing in on the exact site from clues in a colonist’s letter, Tuck unearthed shards of old English earthenware and bits of clay tobacco pipes in test pits a kilometre to the east of where historians believed Avalon to be. Intrigued, Tuck and his team started excavating the area in the mid-1980s, unearthing, among other things, a 17th-century forge.
Buried treasure
With funding from the Canadian and Newfoundland governments for a major dig, the team has now unearthed ruins of a massive stone sea wall, two houses, a privy, a possible stable and a storehouse littered with broken crucibles and other equipment favoured by 17th-century alchemists. And just this summer, they found the first 30 metres or so of the cobblestone street that ran down the centre of the settlement. “If it were possible,” says Tuck, “you could roll up the town’s asphalt and dig down a metre and walk down the pretty street where Calvert and his family walked.”
Indeed, what impresses Tuck is how much of the colony still remains. Unlike some excavated settlements where only stains mark the site of vanished wood-frame buildings, the team at Ferryland has unearthed waist-height stone walls. “This is far and away – in British North America anyway – the most substantial of the colonies,” says Tuck.
And what is fascinating is how British it appears. Colonists searched out slate exactly like the Welsh variety, and painstakingly stuck to familiar building styles. “It was a real attempt to bring a piece of the West Country or Wales to the New World,” says Tuck.
But it is one of the humblest parts of the colony that is proving the most revealing. While excavating a cesspit linked to both the privy and what was possibly a stable, the researchers unearthed a veritable inventory of 17th-century colonial crops and foods. Among the remains they found thousands of imported and native seeds – including wheat, oats, peas and the Damsen plums that still grow in Ferryland – together with evidence of cod, herring, lobsters, mussels and clams.
And strewn about the pit were small pieces of textiles – some of silk and velvet – that clearly served as the colonists’ toilet paper. “There were lots of bits of cloth and some of them fairly fancy stuff, so we’re going to learn lots from those,” says Tuck.
Even the wastes have something intriguing to tell. Patrick Horne, a palaeopathologist from York County Hospital in Newmarket, Ontario, recently examined the cesspit sediments, taking samples of faecal material. Under the microscope, he identified the eggs of three well-known species of human intestinal parasites – giant roundworm, whip worm and giant tapeworm.
But the samples also contained a fourth type of egg Horne had never seen before. Intrigued, he sent it off to the Provincial Health Laboratory in Toronto, where Theodore Scholten identified it as a rare species of liver fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum. Known from Anglo-Saxon and Roman sites, the fluke had never before turned up in a site in the New World. “This was very exciting,” says Horne. “But it tied right in with these people coming from Britain.”
While these parasites would have weakened infected humans, producing symptoms ranging from pneumonia to severe diarrhoea, none were killers. On the whole, says Tuck, Avalon was probably healthier than many sites picked by early British settlers. “It wasn’t the nice warm spot people heard about in Virginia, but there was no malaria or anything either.” Indeed, as excavations of late 17th-century layers at the site now reveal, some colonists clearly thrived at Avalon, staying on long after Calvert left. “The fact is,” notes Tuck, “that except for one year, 1696 to 1697 [when French forces razed the colony], people have been here ever since.
Some 60 kilometres away to the northeast, at Cupids Cove, another team of archaeologists led by Gilbert is shedding light on other aspects of colonial life. Gilbert has devoted much of his recent research to unravelling the early relations between English colonists and the native North Americans, the Beothuk, who were wiped out after decades of hostilities with Europeans and neighbouring bands in the 19th century. Last summer, the archaeologists’ investigations took a new twist when Gilbert and his team located what appears to be the original Cupids Cove colony.
Founded in 1610 by the London and Bristol Company, a group of English merchant adventurers, the colony at Cupids Cove was conceived purely as a commercial endeavour. Governor John Guy, a Bristol merchant, and the other industrious colonists laid the groundwork for a host of enterprises – fishing, farming, lumber milling, mining, glass manufacturing and, last but not least, trading with the Beothuk. “They were well aware of what was going on in other parts of the New World where the French were trading with the Indians,” says Gilbert, “and they were hoping to get in on that as well.”
The exact location of the colony had long been lost. Intrigued, Gilbert arrived at Cupids Cove last June, armed with three slender clues. According to colonists’ letters and journals, the settlement had once been based next to a small trout stream and some 240 paces away from a freshwater lake. Moreover, the colony’s brewery was known to have stood beside a little saltwater pond.
As Gilbert mulled over the references, he could see that all three pointed to a 500-metre area in the present day community. And nature itself soon lent a hand to the investigations. Along the western end of the area, a severe windstorm had knocked down a trio of trees. Tangled in their roots, Gilbert found shards of 17th-century earthenware. “The area just fit so well with the description of where it should be, I was pretty sure we had it.”
The team soon began collecting the telltale detritus of early colonial life, from fragments of case bottles – thin green glass containers once stored in wooden boxes or cases and used by English settlers before 1650 – to the rubble of a stone and brick fireplace. But Gilbert was particularly interested in the fragments of clay pipes.
Researchers specialising in early English tobacco pipes have devised a simple dating system. “Generally speaking,” says Gilbert, “the larger the bore through the stem, the older the pipe is.” A bore measuring 9/64ths of an inch, for example, usually dates between 1580 and 1620, while one measuring 8/64ths of an inch is slightly newer, dating between 1620 to 1650. And so on. At Cupids Cove, says Gilbert, “we found pipestems with really large bores – 8s and 9s”. Indeed, a detailed calculation of bore sizes in the lowest layers led to a mean date of 1617.
Such findings, says Gilbert, suggest that they have now found the original Cupids Cove colony. “I don’t know what else it can be,” he notes. “It’s in the right location, based on the documents, and it’s in the right period.” And team members are now looking forward to expanding the excavations this year.
Locating evidence of the colony is only a small first step. Detailed study at the site could shed critical new light on several outstanding controversies, including the nature of the colonists, early dealings with the Beothuk.
Peace and profit
A hunting and gathering people, the Beothuk remain one of the most mysterious of all North American Indian groups. Despite this, their practice of painting faces and limbs – and perhaps inadvertently, clothing and gear -with crimson-coloured ochre inspired the now common epithet Red Man. They were long thought a shy, reticent people who diligently avoided early contact with English colonists. But after poring over the remaining historical documents from Cupids Cove – including a journal written by governor Guy himself and preserved in the Lambeth Palace Library – Gilbert has now arrived at a very different conclusion.
In 1612 for example, governor Guy records how he and a group of men set out in two small boats to explore the shoreline of Trinity Bay. As they sailed around the southern end of the bay, they spied numerous Beothuk encampments, all apparently abandoned. But as they reached the far end of Truce Sound -better known today as Bull Arm – they spied a blazing fire on a distant beach. Taking it as an invitation to approach, they made their way cautiously.
Along the beach, the Beothuk had strung poles with furs and necklaces of shells – wares they were clearly prepared to trade. And as the English crew approached, the Beothuk greeted them warmly. “They approached Guy’s men dancing and chanting,” says Gilbert, “and there was an exchange of presents.” Far from being reticent, the Beothuk welcomed them with a practised ceremony.
Gilbert has begun searching for some of the Beothuk camps mentioned in Guy’s journal. Near the southern end of Trinity Bay, he has started excavations at a Beothuk camp that seems much like one visited by Guy in 1612. Scattered among the stone arrowheads and butchered caribou bones, Gilbert and his team found scraps of European copper, early iron nails, a piece of a European key which was probably worn as an ornament and fragments of case-glass bottles that probably held aqua vitae, a distilled liquor. “I think it helps substantiate what the documents say, for Guy mentions giving the Beothuk aqua vitae,” says Gilbert.
All the evidence suggests that the Beothuk were eager to establish peaceful trading relations. And the colonists acted with goodwill. It now seems likely, reckons Gilbert, that such peaceful attitudes were typical of initial dealings between the two groups. “I think these fishermen-settlers probably had a healthy respect for the Beothuk, and I think that’s really been underestimated.”
Just when these amicable relations soured, to be replaced by open confrontation and violence, still remains to be seen. But as Gilbert and his team pore over the ruins of Cupids Cove and scattered Beothuk debris near Trinity Bay, they will be sifting carefully for clues to the native people’s tragic end.
