Cupids

The remnants of a wall that was built to protect
their houses from invading ships.

I had the opportunity to visit Cupids a few times throughout the summer. It was pretty fun, not only because I love road trips but also because of the rich history that is there. There's an archaeological dig going on there currently that is exploring John Guy's settlement there and I got to get a front row view of the place.

The remnants of the forge.

The first thing you'll notice is that they have built a skeleton structure of the original building. They built the structure of the original building so that you can walk through it and really see what it looked like without obstructing the archaeological dig.

You can see the dark patch where the forge itself was. The
slurry byproduct of the heated metals dyed the ground darker.
The trail leading from it is where the water would have
trickled off, farther down the forge. 

The section in the pictures on the left is what is left of their forge. Something that an archaeologist taught me while I was there was that you can tell where their forge, cooling vat, and drain were based on the colour of the stains in the dirt. It blows my mind that four hundred years later you can still see the stains in the dirt.

 It was really cool to see this. I've always loved archaeology. When I went to Russell's Point, I loved researching all the archaeological research that they did. To get to walk onto an archaeological dig was a dream come true for me.

The shadow house. It was really cool to walk in there and
think that this was actually where the first structure was built.
I literally got to walk in history.

It was also really cool seeing what they were able to find. If I'd seen the stained dirt, I would have thought "Hey, cool. Colourful dirt." They saw it and were able to map out something that was destroyed at least three centuries ago.









The three pictures below are of remnants of graves. When you go there you can look at a logbook they had of people who had died there. It was both interesting and witty as they had often spoke in riddles. One person had "died of thought", which refers to how the man had killed someone in England, hopped on a boat, and went to the New World in hopes of escaping. He presumable died either of the stress of guilt or that he may have killed himself.

If there's anything that I learned from my experience in Cupids, it was that you can't dismiss anything at face value. They look past the obvious in order to discover the truth hidden underneath. This encounter really rekindled my love for archaeology and mysteries. I know that I have to go back there some day.

Some Further Thoughts

This summer has been awesome. It was busy, it was chaotic, but it was awesome. At the start of this summer, I knew next to nothing about where I was from and a mediocre knowledge about my own people. This project really gave me the opportunity to go back and explore.

As someone who loves history, it was almost embarrassing how little I knew. I spent my education feeling envious of the Europeans for being surrounded by all of this history and not appreciating it as much as I said I would, while I was surrounded by all of this brilliant history and completely ignoring it.

What have I learned about my people this summer? I have learned that we are a strong people. We have faced some great oppositions and some pretty sad disasters, but we survived. We are a funny people. I loved researching the ways that Newfoundlanders have used humour to not only cope but to also come to terms with their struggles. I love the people. I have met some amazing people along the road. When I went to Brigus I met this awesome woman named Tina who told me about all of these great things I could see there and even gave me a print out of a write up she'd made on it so I could read it myself. When i went to Cupids I had this awesome woman named Megan tour me around the archaeological dig and her enthusiasm reminded me of why I love what I do. When I went to The Rooms in St. John's, I met a guy named Larry who reminded me that Newfoundland actually was a part of the World Wars and of the impact it had on the world and on Newfoundland. Everywhere I went I met amazing people. I love that I learned so much from this journey by simply meeting people and going places. I didn't pick up many books, usually only to get dates and precise information. Other than that it was entirely through my adventures and happenings that I learned everything I've been talking about and the even greater wealth I didn't have the time to share with you all.

I have learned a lot about where I came from. I didn't know anything about my father's side of the family whatsoever. Now I know I had a Great Grandmother Hazel who didn't have a middle name so she would joke that it was 'nut' so she would be 'Hazel Nut', and that she worked in Joey Smallwood's house as a servant/maid. I had a Great Grandfather who owned a garage. I learned that my grandmother met my grandfather when she began working for him at his snack bar. I find that super cute. I guess what I mean to say is that this course actually made me realize "Oh, my dad's parents didn't just spontaneously generate out of thin air, they actually came from somewhere."

If there's anything else that I really wanted to say about this project is that it has really given me a new view of what is around me. It never really dawned on me that I was missing all of this amazing stuff that is right in front of me. Stopping and smelling the historical roses this summer has left me realizing just how many amazing things are right here and that I've wasted 22 years of my life not giving them the proper respect that they deserve. While The 709 Project may be ending here, at least for now, I feel that my adventure's really just begun, because I'm going to go forward from here continuing to learn more and more about the world around me.

It's been a pleasure to adventure with you guys this summer and I hope that I get the chance to return to adventure more with you guys again sometime. Go forth and start your own little adventures and learn about where you're all from. Perhaps I will keep posting some findings and such throughout the school year but I am packing so that I can return to university and won't be able to adventure the way I have been this summer. It has been an honour and hopefully we will have the opportunity to keep adventuring together.

The Great Fire(s) of St. John's

Something I talked about in a previous blog on generosity was that St. John's had so many great fires that if you googled "Great Fire of St. John's," Google would respond with "Pfft, which one?" While this may sound like tomfoolery, it's actually quite true. Between the years of 1816 and 1892, St. John's burnt down five times, or at least large parts of it.

The first three fires of St. John's were in 1816, 1817, and 1819. Not much is known about these three fires. I am uncertain as to if this is because of records being destroyed or simply because we never knew much about them, but either way not much is known as to how they started, how much burnt down, and the such. All I can really say about those three with confidence was that clearly they were doing something right in 1818.

A map of downtown St. John's. I highlighted the ground zeroes of both Great Fires.

The two later fires had extremely similar circumstances, which I find very interesting because I appreciate studying natural disasters. Both the fire of 1846 and 1892 were preceded by a month with little to no rain fall, which dried the wooden buildings of downtown St. John's out quite nicely into the perfect kindling for a Great Fire. The dryness mixed with the usual high winds of Newfoundland made the 'perfect storm' of opportunities for a fire to catch and spread, as the dry wood was highly flammable and the winds helped to spread burning embers all over St. John's.

A photo of the ruins after the Great Fire of 1892.

The Great Fire of 1846 was caused by a glue pot boiling over in a cabinetmaker's workshop. This fire would go on to destroy around 2,000 buildings, causing around $1,300,000 dollars in damage and leaving over 12,000 people homeless. Oddly enough, only three people died, despite the carnage. The Great Fire of 1892 was even more devastating. The fire started in someone's barn when they were smoking and dropped their pipe. This fire would spread, creating $13,000,000 worth of damage, killing three.


Something that I learned that I found was interesting was that every time St. John's burnt down it was built back better. The fires caused the government to make specific jobs to guard against problems such as fires, they built schools to teach women skills so that they could learn how to make products to earn a living, and they learned new types of architecture and construction so as to defend against further fires.

Newfoundland Generosity

Something I really wanted to talk about is Newfoundland generosity. I'm sure you've heard about it somewhere. As someone who's driven coast to coast of this country, many people say that Newfoundlanders are some of the kindest people they've ever met. I figured I would take some time to look at some of my favourite examples of Newfoundlanders and ponder why they can be such generous beings.

Lanier Phillips in the 1940s. Exact year of photo
unknown.

The first example that I can think about is Robert Chafe's play Oil and Water. You may remember that I Instagrammed a picture of my copy of the book a couple of weeks ago. It is still to this day my favourite play, possibly my favourite piece of literature, and as a Lit major who's almost done his third year of university, that is saying something. Oil and Water is based on a true story. The story starts in 1942 at Lawn Point, off the coast of Newfoundland. The USS Truxtun and USS Pollux ran aground and sank, killing hundreds. Oil coated the waters so bad that when an African-American man was pulled out of the water the Newfoundlanders had scrubbed his skin raw because they thought he was coated in oil like his Caucasian colleagues. The play tells the story of Lanier Phillips, the only African-American survivor of the disaster. This man lived in a time where people threw stones at him for being black. He was the only African-American survivor because his white coworkers forced the African-Americans to wait on the boats until they had all gotten into lifeboats.

Lanier (Ryan Allen) being cared on by Violet and Ena (Petrina
Bromley and Alison Woolridge respectively). This production
was performed by Artistic Fraud.

These Newfoundlanders had never seen a black man before and were baffled when the oil just wouldn't scrub off of the sailor's skin, when it was really just the colour of his skin. These people had never met a black man before and their instinct was to take him in as one of their own. They took him in, bathed him, clothed him, and nursed him back to health while also struggling to take care of each other, let alone some stranger. I find this heartbreaking and a great testimony to the Newfoundland spirit. I said it before but I actually got the pleasure to see one of Artistic Fraud's first showings of this great play, and it was an honour. It has a unique and beautiful score that is a very different blend of African American gospel and Newfoundland folk music. If you ever have the chance to see this show live, go and see it.

"Plane people" staying in a school gym in Lewisporte. The
notebook that was passed around to create the scholarship
fund almost certainly went through this room.

Another example that I find represents the Newfoundland spirit of generosity was Newfoundland's reaction to 9/11. As you most likely know, but I will do a brief refresher, back in 2001 two planes were hijacked and flown into the Twin Towers, killing many and devastating people all over the globe. Planes all over the place were ordered to land. When Gander, a town of 9,651 people in Newfoundland, heard, they immediately declared a state of emergency and opened their airport and doors to everyone they could fit. They went on to host almost 7,000 people from 95 different countries on 38 planes for the next five days. Since the hotels of the town owned roughly 500 rooms between them, churches, schools, and community centres from Gander and surrounding areas took in everyone they could fit. When that was not enough to hold everyone, the people of Gander and surrounding areas opened up their own homes as billets.

Planes had to stay on the runways because there are not enough
terminals and parking space in the Gander airport for this many
planes of this great size.

An amount of them were sent on busses to Lewisporte, as they all couldn't fit in Gander. A story about that that inspires me is that the people housed in Lewisporte were so grateful that they offered the locals money. Since none of them would take it, the "plane people", as the locals called them, passed around a notebook writing down their name and how much they would donate. This money went to create a scholarship fund for the children of Lewisporte. By the end of their stay, they had raised $15,000 for the children of Lewisporte. One of the plane people who worked with a group that creates scholarship funds used this money to create more money for the scholarship fund. In the past sixteen years the fund has created around $2,000,000 and has helped hundreds of students through university and is still growing. It's beautiful to see that the natural response to generosity is generosity and that people of such different backgrounds can come together and do such great things for each other.

The ad design for Come From Away. This show tells the
story of the "plane people" and those who took them in.

This story has gone on to inspire the musical Come From Away, a musical that tells the story of the plane people and those who took them in. This musical has won numerous awards, including a Tony, which is a major accomplishment, and is now on Broadway. I haven't seen it myself but I have heard the soundtrack and it is outstanding.

To do a bit of research on the statistics of Newfoundland generosity, I found out that, according to Statistics Canada in 2013, Newfoundland and Labrador as a province has the highest percentage of people who donate to charities, ranking in at 87 percent. Apparently Newfoundland and Labrador has been the highest province in that statistic in every study since 2004. While I can look at facts and studies until I'm blue in the face, I would like to offer up why I think Newfoundlanders are so generous.

Since the beginning of Newfoundland's founding and initial European settlement, Newfoundland has always been a group of small towns. When you go into a small town here in Newfoundland, everybody knows everybody and it's like family. We've never really been a wealthy island and so Newfoundlanders have survived for centuries not by fighting their way to the top but by carrying each other as high as they can. People survived by coming together and helping each other through their problems and struggles. Newfoundland has been hit by famines, tsunamis, wars, and St. John's, our biggest city, has burnt down five times. When you google "The Great Fire of St. John's" it responds with "pfft, which one?" I feel that this generosity roots from the fact that we have struggled together through many challenges and disasters and it is that bond of camaraderie that holds us all together. Can I say that with certainty? Not really. Can I say that this is my educated guess? Definitely. All I have to do is go to the local Foodland to find a good conversation with a complete stranger about just about anything. As someone who has lived in four different provinces and have visited the rest on several occasions each, I can say that Newfoundland and maybe one or two others are the only ones that I can consistently do that in.

But yeah, that's it for this blog. I want to end by asking you what you think could be a factor as to why Newfoundlanders often have an innate sense of generosity. Feel free to post your ideas in the comments as I would love to hear what you all think

The Food of Newfoundland

Okay, so anybody who has gone to Newfoundland can say that if there's one thing that Newfoundland does differently, it's food. As someone from Newfoundland who has travelled all over Canada, I can tell you that we definitely do food differently, so I figured I would take some time and talk about our food traditions.

First off, I want to talk about some basic food thoughts.

• We put vinegar on most everything. Fries, fish, chicken, you name it. It's something in every Newfoundland fridge. When we're not using it as a condiment, we're pickling stuff in it. Pickled foods (such as beets, pickles, and olives) are another big thing here.
• We drink a lot of tea. When I say a lot of tea, I mean A LOT OF TEA. The kettle is always on. Orange pekoe is the poison of choice for the most part, although some prefer earl grey.
• Crush Soda has two flavours available only in Newfoundland: Pineapple and Birch Beer. Pineapple tastes just like if a pineapple popsicle was made into a soda with a hint of pure liquid joy. Birch Beer tastes like normal Root Beer but is significantly better, and it's pink. You can find them in very sparse locations across Canada, but it's sold everywhere in Newfoundland and it is the greatest joy in life.
• Molasses goes on many things, especially toutons (Newfoundland's version of bannock) and toast. Screech is a type of rum produced in Newfoundland. Since Newfoundland played such a major role in European trade routes with the rest of the world, sugar cane was often brought through here. Sugar cane, when refined, creates molasses and rum. Screech is known for being particularly sharp. There's a ceremony called 'Screech ins' where people take a shot of screech, kiss a cod fish, then swear the Screecher's Oath in order to become honorary Newfoundlanders.

Jiggs (on the left) of Bringing Up Father, the most likely
namesake of Jiggs Dinner.

Newfoundland's most signature dish has to be Jiggs Dinner. Jiggs Dinner most likely gets it's name from Jiggs, the main character of the comic strip Bringing Up Father, although this cannot be said with certainty. The main ingredient in Jiggs Dinner is salt beef, which is similar to corner beef. It's beef riblets that are salt-cured and pickled in brine until it's so salty you've gotta boil it in a huge pot full of water for hours to make it's consumption survivable. Other ingredients in Jiggs Dinner are potatoes, turnip, cabbage, carrots, and peas pudding. Peas pudding is made of yellow split peas boiled until they can be mashed into a thick, dry pudding. What makes it so signaturely Newfoundlandish is that it is all boiled in the same pot as the salt beef, giving it all a very distinct salty flavour that can't be replicated with simple table salt.

A jar of savoury from Mt. Scio Farm here in St. John's,
Note that NL savoury is not to be mistaken with 'summer
savory'. They are similar but not the same.

Jiggs Dinner, often called cooked dinner, is often served with a main protein; often a roast or whole poultry. While salt beef is the main ingredient to cooked dinner, the most important ingredient is hands down the dressing and gravy. Newfoundland dressing, often mistaken with mainland stuffing (which is an insult to the ambrosia that is dressing), is made of bread crumbs, butter, pepper, and savoury. Savoury is a type of spice mostly found in Newfoundland (but again can be found in certain other locations) is a green herb that when cooked turns black and gives Newfoundland dressing it's unique taste. And of course no cooked dinner is complete without gravy. Newfoundland gravy can be distinguished by it's thick and dark appearance, as well as it's strong, salty flavour. Something I find really depressing is when someone in the mainland says there will be gravy with dinner and it's thin and white and tastes like flour and water. It's really sad, but I guess that's how people may feel when they see our gravy, how mistaken they are.

Cod is another food that has been significant to Newfoundland food. Since the fishery has always been a hopping business here since John Cabot first landed here, it has been readily available food for centuries. Cod is often battered either in a basic flour batter or a beer batter and fried, either in a pan or deep fried, and served with tartar sauce. Our tartar sauce is mayonaisse, horseradish, and relish. I don't know if that's tartar sauce everywhere though. I just say this because a lot of places I have visited across Canada use Miracle Whip and dill and call it Tartar sauce, which maybe we're the different ones or maybe I've just been going to weird places.

The logo of Purity Factories. It has had
some face-lifts over the years but has
stayed mostly the same.

One more thing that I feel is greatly relevant to the idea of Newfoundland food is Purity Factories. Purity Factories was founded in 1924 and has become a rather famous example of Newfoundland food. They produce all sorts of products such as cream crackers (which are absolutely delicious), peppermint nobs, all sorts of candies, biscuits, and cookies, jam jams (my personal favourite), and flavoured syrups that are comparable to grenadine. Something very special they make is hard bread, comparable to hardtack, which was a staple food for fisherman and a key ingredient in fish and brewis, which is another big food here in Newfoundland. Fish and brewis is the epitome of homecooked meals here in Newfoundland. It is salt fish, hard bread, and mashed potatoes all mashed together and usually eaten with vinegar, mustard, or some other condiment.

An ad for Jam Jams, the crowning
creation of Purity Factories. They are
small, soft molasses cookies with a
Purity-made jam between them.

But yeah, that's a bit of information about some of my favourite Newfoundland foods. Feel free to comment, like, subscribe, share, etcetera etcetera, you all know the drill. If you have any questions or notice any foods I may have forgotten that you would like me to cover, let me know and I can always add it in somewhere. If there's one thing I love talking about, it's food.

Where Did All the Trains Go?

Ain't she pretty? I wanted to climb
up on it for a picture but tetanus is
a very real thing.

A couple days ago I went to Carbonear. My sister's beginning a program in a college out that way, so I figured

we could go map out the area and all that. As we prepared to turn the corner to the college, I saw this massive, rusted out train. This got me thinking, what happened to the trains of Newfoundland? I know that we had trains back in the day as lots of great berry picking routes cross 'train tracks' (meaning where the train tracks used to be).

The logo of Newfoundland Railway. It was absorbed
by the Canadian National Railway Company, who's
logo you can see in the first picture painted on the
train itself.

The railroads of Newfoundland were built in 1898 and stretched across the island in order to make travel and the transportation of goods easier. The Newfoundland Railway was in operation until 1949 when Newfoundland joined Confederation and they were absorbed by the Canadian National Railway Company. The trains continued to operate across Newfoundland until 1988, when they were officially abandoned and mostly removed.

I remember my parents telling me about when they were younger and how they would travel on the trains and how much they enjoyed it, so this makes me wonder why it was closed down. The Trans-Canada Highway was finished being built in Newfoundland towards the end of 1965, making travel across the island much more efficient for those travelling by automobile or for shipping products, eliminating much of the demand for the trains.

I didn't have a tape measure handy so I used my key lanyard
for reference in this photo. The tracks are actually quite narrow.

Another factor to it's decline was the refusal to expand their track gauge. Newfoundland's tracks were 3'6" across, making them rather narrow, as you can see in the image here. Canada's standard track gauge is 4'8.5", making them significantly wider and thus significantly safer as well as more efficient as they can contain more. Since Newfoundland is so large with such little population, the cost to have to tear up all of their pre-exisiting tracks in order to put down new ones was too much to pay. The cost of building the Trans-Canada Highway was hard on Newfoundlanders as we have the second longest amount of highway per province (behind Ottawa) in one of the roughest terrains (the only real competition for that is maybe British Columbia) with one of the fewest amounts of people to divide it between (a population of roughly 455,000 people when they began construction of the TCH) so to do that on top of the expansion of their railroads was too much. They decided to declare the railroad officially obsolete and retire the trains.

I love that they still have some of
the train tracks still down.

Several train cars can still be found around the island. Three that I know of and got to see personally were in St. John's, Carbonear, and Whitbourne, but I'm sure there must be more across the island, these are just the three I had the opportunity to see in person. If you want to learn more, there's an awesome train museum in Whitbourne as well as a massive train museum in St. John's that is actually built in the old St. John's Train Station, so it's like a three-for-one deal: a historical train building full of historical train facts next to a historical train car.

Joey Smallwood

This is the portrait of him that my Nan had in her
stairwell that gave me nightmares.

Hello again! Tim here, your favourite Newfoundland adventurer. So, someone who's been coming up a lot lately has been Joey Smallwood. As I've been researching and reading up on some Newfoundland history and destinations, his name has been coming up over and over again. If I was to list everything I know about Joey Smallwood I would say that he played a big role in Newfoundland joining Confederation, that he wore big funny glasses, that there was a ferry between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia named after him, and that my Nan had a huge picture of him hung up in our stairwell as a kid that used to give me nightmares. I actually know very little about him, so I figured I would dig into him a little bit to give us all a better understanding of him since he's been popping up all over the place.

So, if you've been following along with my adventures you may have seen how I found a picture of him in Brigus and Cupids, as well as the horse weather vane in Brigus that is mistakenly called 'Joey's Horse'. I am not joking when I say that he pops up everywhere.

A campaign poster of Smallwood back
in his political days.

If there's anything I can open up with when talking about Joey Smallwood, it's that his legacy is very divided. When you ask some Newfoundlanders about him, they sing his praises. When you ask others, they thought he was a complete buffoon, which well explains why many young people such as myself are so confused about who he was.

Smallwood began working as a journalist, became a campaign manager for politicians, then became a politician himself, left politics to become a radio personality, had a brief period operating a pig farm, and then returned to politics. It's a very unique career track to say the least.

He was an entertaining figure. He was flamboyant, he was upfront, and he was influential. A lot of the stories I've read about him give me the vibe of a small town Winston Churchill, but less abrasive. One time, when Smallwood was walking down a road in Corner Brook, he jokingly said the road reminded him of Broadway (Let the record show that the road is nothing like Broadway.). That road, to this day, is still called Broadway Street.

Smallwood, once he became a proper politician himself, pushed for Newfoundland to join Confederation. He founded the Confederation Association that campaigned for Confederation, and persuaded 52.3% of Newfoundlanders to vote to join Canada. This was not an entirely popular decision and to this day some people still question whether or not we should have. He then became the first Premier of Newfoundland, and to this day is still the longest reigning Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, holding office for 23 years with almost no opposition. ("and Labrador" was not added to the title until 2001.)

Smallwood heavily pushed for the welfare state in Newfoundland, creating a movement for the creation of 'baby bonuses' and various other welfare programs. He also pushed for the industrialization of Newfoundland with the creation of various paper mills, mining, and hydroelectricity.

A bust of Smallwood at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland in St. John's.

His memory is not pristine, however. He did make some rather large mistakes. The most notable of these mistakes was with Churchill Falls. Churchill Falls is a source of a massive amount of hydroelectricity in Labrador. When it was decided that it fell within the boundaries of Labrador and not Quebec, All of it's profit should have gone to Newfoundland when they had decided to route it to Northeastern USA, but there was no practical way to wire it down to them without bringing it through Quebec. Because Smallwood was so determined to have Churchill Falls in operation, he agreed to a deal with Quebec that in exchange for routing the electricity through Quebec, Quebec would get so much of the profit from it. Sounds like a great deal, eh? Nope. For decades, Quebec was making a fortune (some nine digits or more) while Newfoundland actually lost money on it.  Now some people consider the fact that it would have been highly impractical to go around Quebec to the extent that Newfoundland never would have made a profit off of it, but the reality is that through the inflation of the price of electricity it most likely would have.

I find it interesting to look back at Smallwood and ponder what he would have been like in person. He passed away in 1991, three years before I was born, so I never had the chance to meet him. I hear great things, I hear awful things. I guess, at the end of the day, it really does depend on who you ask.