Newfoundland Guide

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.

St John's lies on the eastern shore of the Avalon Peninsula, a jagged, roughly rectangular slab of land that's connected to the rest of Newfoundland by a narrow isthmus only 4km wide. Concentrated around Conception Bay, whose eastern shoreline lies 15km west of the capital, the Avalon's settlements stick resolutely to the coast, hiding from a bare and rocky interior that received its inappropriate name when George Calvert, later Lord Baltimore, received a royal charter to colonize the region in 1621. Calvert subsequently became the victim of a confidence trick: the settlers he dispatched sent him such wonderful reports that he decided to move there himself. He only lasted one winter, writing to a friend - I have sent [my family] home after much sufferance in this woful country, where with one intolerable wynter were wee almost undone. It is not to be expressed with my pen what wee have endured.

For centuries, life in Saint Johns has focused on the harbour. In its heyday it was crammed with ships from a score of nations, but today - although its population is about 105,000 - it's a shadow of its former self, with just the odd oil tanker or trawler creeping through the 200-metre-wide channel of The Narrows into the jaw-shaped inlet. Once a rumbustious port, it's become a far more subdued place, the rough houses of the waterfront mostly replaced by shops and offices, its economy dominated by white-collar workers who are concentrated in a string of downtown skyscrapers and in the Confederation Building, the huge government complex on the western outskirts.