Norse ruins mark North America’s eastern island edge
Newfoundland, the large island of Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador province, holds over 90 percent of the province’s people on only 29 percent of its land—about 60 percent crowded onto the Avalon Peninsula. Cape Spear near St. John’s is North America’s easternmost point excluding Greenland.
Covering about 108,878 square kilometres, Newfoundland ranks fifteenth among the world's islands and fourth in Canada, the biggest Canadian island outside the North. By plugging the mouth of the Saint Lawrence it closes off the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the largest estuary on Earth, and its closest neighbour is French: Saint Pierre and Miquelon lies just 19 kilometres away. The population grew from 479,105 at the 2006 census to 510,550 in 2021.
Dorset people settled around 4,000 years ago but were gone before the Norse came; the Beothuk, probably kin of Labrador's Innu, followed. About 700 Beothuk are thought to have lived here when Europeans arrived, and disease, starvation and lost access to coastal food wiped them out. Shanawdithit, often called the last full Beothuk, died of tuberculosis in St. John's in 1829. In Mi'kmaq the island is Ktaqmkuk, 'across the waves'.
Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad uncovered L'Anse aux Meadows in 1960, the only authenticated Norse settlement in North America and home to its oldest known European buildings. In 2021 researchers used a burst of cosmic radiation recorded in tree rings from 993–994 to show that Vikings were cutting wood there in 1021. Roughly 500 years later, in 1497, John Cabot sailed from Bristol for Henry VII, landing at a spot still argued over, with Cape Bonavista and Cape Bauld the leading candidates.
Humphrey Gilbert claimed the island for Elizabeth I on 5 August 1583, making it England's first overseas colony, though he drowned on the way home. John Guy led 39 colonists to Cuper's Cove in 1610. Under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht France ceded its shores and kept only Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Fish defined the place so thoroughly that Irish settlers called it Talamh an Éisc, 'land of the fish', and Scottish Gaelic speakers Eilean a' Trosg, 'island of the cod'.
Source: Newfoundland (island)
