The Good and Beautiful Bay: A History of Bonne Bay to Confederation and a Little Beyond

By Antony Berger

At the heart of Gros Morne National Park is Bonne Bay with its magnificent landscape, sheltered arms and coves, and abundant marine life. Bonne Bay occupies an important place in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador. Long known to Aboriginal peoples, in the mid-1800s it grew rapidly as settlers swarmed in to take advantage of the herring and lobster fishery. Tensions between the competing claims by the French and British were often played out here. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Bonne Bay grew to become the administrative centre for the northwest coast. Today, it is one of Eastern Canada’s most popular tourist destinations, visited by people from all over the world.

This book reviews the history of Bonne Bay before Confederation in 1949. It describes the people that came to live here, with glimpses of some of the main characters, the way of life, and the influences of church and school. The book ends with the story of how Gros Morne National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, came to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: May 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781771173391

Antony Berger

Antony Berger is a graduate of Dalhousie, the University of Melbourne, and Liverpool University and has lectured on every continent except Antarctica. The author and editor of numerous scientific books and articles and more recently The Good and Beautiful Bay (Flanker 2014), a history of Bonne Bay, Newfoundland, he divides his time between Woody Point, NL, and Wolfville, NS, where his is a keen choral singer.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Berger, Antony R., author

      The good and beautiful bay : a history of Bonne Bay to Confederation and a little beyond / Antony Berger.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77117-338-4 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77117-339-1 (epub).--

ISBN 978-1-77117-340-7 (kindle).--ISBN 978-1-77117-341-4 (pdf)

      1. Bonne Bay (N.L.)--History. 2. Bonne Bay (N.L.)--Genealogy. I. Title.

© 2014 by Antony Berger

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

Cover Design by Graham Blair Illustrated by Albert Taylor

FRONT COVER: View looking across Bonne Bay from above Woody Point (lower left corner) to Norris Point and Neddy Harbour with Gros Morne looming in the background (2013 photo by Philip Rendell).

BACK COVER: This watercolour of South Arm was painted by Frances Musgrave in 1866, and is reproduced from the original in the National Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa (accession number 1958-34-6, item 6, negative 46835). The notation on the bottom reads Entrance to Bonne Bay, Woody Point.

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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

In memory of

Ella Manuel

Map of the island of Newfoundland, showing place names mentioned in the text. From 1713 to 1783, the French Shore extended from Cape Bonavista north to Cape Norman and thence to Pointe Riche by Port au Choix. From 1783 to 1904, it covered the coastline from Cape Ray around the Northern Peninsula to Cape St. John.

Contents

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

Bonne Bay In History

About This Book

Missing Voices and Common Themes

Chapter 2 THE BAY IS BORN AND PEOPLE FIRST ARRIVE

The Landscape Develops

The First Peoples

Charting the Bay

Naming Places

The French Connection

The Peopling of Bonne Bay In the Early 1800s

The Company of Birds

Glimpses of Ordinary Life In the Early 1800s

Chapter 3 BONNE BAY RISING

A Prelude

Britain and France On Edge Over the French Shore

Trouble with Americans Too

The Bounty of the Sea

Salmon

Cod

Herring

Lobster

Halibut, Capling, and Seals

Officialdom Reaches Bonne Bay

Bringing the Mail and Wiring the Bay

Getting In and Around the Bay

Chapter 4 SETTLING DOWN IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY

The Coming of Church and School

The Church of England Settles In

Roman Catholics On the Move

The Methodists Arrive

Home, Food, and Garden

Breaking the Law

A Wonderful Fine Day In

Chapter 5 EARLY SETTLERS AND THEIR FAMILIES

Patterns of Settlement In the Bay

Sources, Errors, and Complications

Who Were the First Settlers?

Rocky Harbour

Norris Point

Bonne Bay (Curzon Village to Baileys Point)

Down to the Bottom

From Poverty In the Bay to Fame In Maine

Chapter 6 BONNE BAY AT A ZENITH (1900-1922)

Through the Eyes of the Camera

The Army, the Clergy, and the Schools

Orange Men, Odd Fellows, Weddings, and Other Times

Booze and Baccy

The Fishery: Herring In Trouble

Timber Becomes King In Eastern Arm

Coastal Steamers and Ferry Boats

Postal Services Improve Slowly and Banking Starts

Dreaming of Trains

No Road Yet

Tending to the Sick and the Hurt

Bonne Bay Goes to War

The North-West Coast Reform Movement

The Great Fire

Chapter 7 THE HARD YEARS: DEPRESSION TO CONFEDERATION

Tough Times Indeed

And More Government Control

The Rangers and the Mutiny

Getting To and Around the Bay

Medical Services and Nutrition Improve

Boom Times In Lomond

Tuna and Tourists

Killdevil Lodge: An Early Venture in Sports Fishing

Church Influence Wanes But Schools Improve

Electricity, Phones, and Radios

To War Again

Confederation: All Hope of Independence Gone

Chapter 8 BONNE BAY RISES AGAIN

Now We Were Canadians

Folksinging In Bonne Bay

Life Goes On

The National Park Arrives

A Brief Summing-Up

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ENDNOTES

REFERENCES CITED

INDEX

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

A lovelier scene cannot be imagined. Great hills in the foreground and beyond; mountains peeping over each other’s shoulders; and away up in the blue sky the snow sparkled on the higher storm-lashed peaks, which reared their heads far inland, all robed in a beautiful transparent atmosphere unknown elsewhere. To the north the hills were bare, rugged, precipitous; but on that particular morning the glorious sunshine made them lose half their desolate bleakness.

BONNE BAY IN HISTORY

One of the most scenic and oft-visited places in all of Atlantic Canada is Bonne Bay. This double-armed fjord and its seaside communities lie at the heart of Gros Morne National Park. The Bay occupies an important place in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador. Tensions between the French and British, who had competing claims along the coast, were often played out in Bonne Bay. It was for many decades in the 1800s and early twentieth century the administrative centre for the northwest coast of the island, and sometimes claimed to be the capital of the West Coast. Whether one sailed from St. John’s around the Northern Peninsula or along the South Coast, Bonne Bay was about equidistant. Though more people now live on the north side of the Bay in Rocky Harbour and Norris Point, in earlier times Woody Point, on its south side, was the regional centre for fishing, commerce, and public services.

As the twentieth century progressed and the pulp and paper industry was established in Corner Brook, Bonne Bay decreased in importance. The establishment in the late twentieth century of the Park and its designation as a United Nations World Heritage Site did much to reverse this trend. Today, Bonne Bay is one of Eastern Canada’s most popular tourist destinations, visited by people from all over the world. Commerce has retreated in the face of nature’s gifts. In a province rich in natural and cultural wonders, Bonne Bay and its surrounds remain a clear favourite. The Bay lies at the base of the Northern Peninsula, and marks the sudden change from steep coastal cliffs and mountains to the south, to a low-lying coastal plain to the north. Inland from this plain, which continues most of the way to the northern tip of the island, are the majestic mountains of the Long Range. These are cut by a number of steep-sided, mostly landlocked valleys, the best-known of which, Western Brook, lies just north of Bonne Bay. The lower elevations around the Bay are forested, but the best timber is to be found on its south side, one reason why the centre of early settlement was here.

The main towns of the Bay—Rocky Harbour, Norris Point and Woody Point, together with the modern municipal triad of Glenburnie-Birchy Head-Shoal Brook—have each played a role in the social and economic development of the area, as did the now-vanished settlement of Lomond. Today, Rocky Harbour is the administrative centre of the Park, while Woody Point hosts its main interpretation facility, the Discovery Centre. Norris Point is home to a nationally important marine research and interpretation centre. Around the Bay, there are now a number of thriving businesses based on tourism, fishing, and transportation, and there are several annual literary, music, and folk festivals.

The only detailed account of the historical development of Bonne Bay published to date is James Candow’s 1998 book Lomond: The Life and Death of a Newfoundland Woods Town. My mother, the late Ella Manuel, a well-known Newfoundland writer and broadcaster, compiled a short history entitled Woody Point 1800-1900. This was privately printed in 1972 as an undated eighteen-page pamphlet with a loosely enclosed map of South Arm of Bonne Bay. It was sold at local outlets until copies ran out in the late 1980s. Roy Osmond produced in 1987 an invaluable study, Families of the South Side of Bonne Bay: this was also privately printed in limited numbers. Several booklets have appeared on the early days of the main settlements, based mainly on the memories of older residents at the time of printing. The 1999 guide to the Park by Michael Burzynski contains a short overview of the human history of the area. Noel Murphy’s 2003 memoir, Cottage Hospital Doctor, tells much about the north side of the Bay in the 1930s and 1940s, as does John K. Crellin’s 2007 book, The Life of a Cottage Hospital. And a delightful memoir by Pat McLeod of her years in Woody Point and around the Bay with Gisela Westphalen—Gros Morne: A Living Landscape—was issued in 1988.

In the past two or three decades, much has been published on Newfoundland’s history and prehistory. A good deal of information on Bonne Bay and the West Coast is also available in unpublished reports and government documents, in newspapers and magazines, and in the provincial archives in St. John’s. The files of Gros Morne National Park in Rocky Harbour contain a wealth of unpublished reports, photographs, and other historical material. The historical importance of Woody Point and its neighbouring communities on the south side of the Bay, and of Lomond, is reflected in the sheer volume of documentation on these settlements: there is rather less on Norris Point and Rocky Harbour. In the 1990s, the Woody Point Town Council initiated several heritage projects and activities, which have brought together much material of historical interest. This includes a series of unedited interviews with older residents recorded in the late 1980s by the now-extinct Bonne Bay Development Association, the tapes and transcripts of which are held in the Woody Point Council office.

I began this book to revise my mother’s little history, but the project quickly got out of hand as a wealth of new information came to light. I decided to concentrate on the period before Confederation in 1949, with some account of developments since, especially the coming of the Park. Ella Manuel well knew that it is impossible to separate an account of the early days of Woody Point from that of other nearby settlements. As families moved around the Bay, sometimes bringing their houses with them, the communities became ever more intricately linked. Readers will find more detail on Woody Point and Bonne Bay South, but I also roam to other parts of Western Newfoundland, so as to set the context in which Bonne Bay itself developed. Although communities immediately north and south of the Bay were often included in official reports on a general Bonne Bay district, I have very little to say here on other towns and villages within the Park—Trout River, Lobster Cove, Bakers Brook, Sally’s Cove, St. Pauls, and Cow Head.

My own experience of Bonne Bay began just after the Second World War, when my mother leased an unoccupied property in Lomond. This she renamed Killdevil Lodge and began there a sports-fishing enterprise. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, my brother and I spent our summers in Lomond. The East Arm was our bay: we saw Woody Point mainly from Norris Point, where we sometimes went by the daily ferry service. Many years later, I came to Woody Point, and for the past two decades have spent part of each year in the house Ella had built there in 1963. As an earth scientist, my career in teaching, research, scientific editing, and publishing took me around the world, so my vision of the Bay is bound to be different from those who grew up here. While painting a general picture of the Bay throughout time, I have paid more attention to topics that interest me, and have skimped on others, such as the cod fishery. I have included a number of stories about events and people around the Bay. Readers may well find strange my choice of people and events to include: another historian would write things quite differently. Those who know Bonne Bay will find no shortage of errors and omissions.¹

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This history follows a medley of themes: the landscape, the naming of places, settlements and settlers, transportation, the fishery, the French, religion, government, social activities, health, logging, tourism, and the Park. Throughout, I include glimpses of the past through the eyes of early travellers and settlers, and through the words of later residents. For the most part, I tackle events in their chronological order, but switch back and forth between topics as they arise, and occasionally jump forward or backward in time.

Chapter 2 very briefly summarizes how the landscape in and around Bonne Bay developed and is still being shaped by human and natural forces. Of the first peoples, the Aboriginals who moved through and camped in the Bay, we have only faint traces and a very incomplete picture constructed from what they left behind. The story of the first European explorers and later map-makers is much clearer, beginning with the famous James Cook, and continuing to the superb work of British Admiralty surveyors in the late nineteenth century. The naming of places around the Bay helps to set the scene for what follows. The reader is then taken from the early to the mid-1800s, encountering the early settlers, what brought them here, how they lived, for whom they worked, and what the French presence on the West Coast meant to them.

We move into the second half of the nineteenth century in Chapter 3. Despite continued discord between the French and local settlers, and the complexities that accompanied the appearance of American fishermen, this was the time of fastest population growth. The fishery, and especially herring and lobster, drove this expansion, but much slower was the development of services like mail, telegraph, roads of a sort, and the first ferries across the Bay. Government officials now made their first appearances here.

Chapter 4 continues with the arrival of the first churchmen, who brought with them basic medicine and education. They played such an important part in the development of Bonne Bay’s settlements that it is appropriate to dwell on church history at some length. Many new homes were built and gardens kept. A measure of order was emerging, but there were problems in keeping the law. The chapter ends with a lovely description of South Arm by a French scientist who spent a day there in 1886.

The people of the Bay, when they arrived and where they lived in the late 1800s, are described in Chapter 5. We take a brief look at some of the prominent families during the late 1800s and first decades of the twentieth century. One famous American sea captain began his life in dire poverty at the bottom of South Arm: his story is worth telling.

The first two decades of the twentieth century are the subject of Chapter 6, which continues many of the earlier themes. Churches and schools were an essential part of each community, and a number of religious and social organizations appeared on the scene. Connecting with the outside world by coastal steamer was essential, but there were many dreams of road and rail. The mail began to move with some regularity, and ferries took people back and forth across the Bay. There were now a few doctors, some trained formally and others self-taught. Bonne Bay men and boys took their part when Newfoundland went to war in Europe, and a few years after the end of the First World War, Woody Point lost by fire much of its business district.

Woody Point recovered slowly after the fire but, with the rest of the Island, shortly fell into the Depression. Chapter 7 deals with the hard years of the 1920s and 1930s, and with the lead-up to Confederation. Life was still tough for many, but there were now opportunities for jobs in the woods and in Corner Brook, as its pulp and paper mill developed. Medical services began to improve, especially with the new cottage hospital in Norris Point. The effect of Newfoundland having given up self-government in the early 1930s was felt in the Bay, as elsewhere on the Island. Lomond was now booming as a centre for woods operations and in the late 1940s for a pioneer tourist venture in sports fishing. The churches remained important, but were no longer the only source of community leadership. Bonne Bay men again went to war in Europe, and not long afterwards, Newfoundland joined Canada.

The full story of Bonne Bay after Confederation is one for another time. I end this book in Chapter 8 with a miscellany of historical scraps, including brief notes on the road, the ferries, and the medical services. Of interest to readers may be the important contribution singers in Rocky Harbour made to the folk song tradition of Newfoundland and Labrador. The main focus for this final chapter, however, is the story of how the area became a national park and some of the troubles that accompanied its development.

It is customary in works of history to include a series of footnotes pointing readers to the author’s sources of information. However, this book is so dependent upon the work of others that the initial draft contained well over 700 footnotes. This seemed rather excessive, so I have combined at the end of each titled section all the sources used there into one endnote. Readers who want more information should be able to find their way without too much inconvenience.

A word about the photographs in this book. Most are based on originals in various collections of historical images. The Heritage Committee of the Town of Woody Point has gathered many photographs from community members (referred to throughout this book as the Woody Point Collection), as has the Jenniex House in Norris Point (Jenniex Collection). The files of Gros Morne National Park (GMNP Collection) hold many photos of historic importance to the whole region covered by the Park. Some years ago, the Geography Department of Memorial University (MUN Geography Collection) digitized a series of historical photographs taken in many parts of the province, including a few often-reproduced scenes from Bonne Bay. Many of these and others come from Memorial University’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies (CNS). The most authoritative photographic library is held by The Rooms Provincial Archives (PANL) in St. John’s. Some years ago, David Ledrew in Corner Brook rescued a large collection of photographs of Bowater woods operations, which include many from woods operations in and around Lomond (Bowater Collection). In 1918 and again in 1933, geologists from Yale University visited Western Newfoundland and took a series of photographs in the Bonne Bay region; these are now stored in the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven (Dunbar Collection). In 1934-35, a young English lad, David Hope-Simpson, travelled around the Island with geological field parties and spent the fall and winter in and around Lomond. His neatly labelled photo album was recently donated by his family to Gros Morne National Park (DHS Album). Virtually every photograph in this book has been modified from the original to bring out the topic of interest more clearly.

Sorting out place names—toponymy—is always a complex matter, for there are a great many variations in usage. Much information can be found in a 2012 compilation by Raymond Cusson entitled The People’s Map of Bonne Bay. This useful chart is a record of place names around the Bay as used by residents, some of whom have different names for the same locality, such as Whale Cove for Wild Cove, and Main Arm for East Arm. The same name is commonly applied to different places, such as Seal Cove in East Arm and South Arm, and The Bottom in both Rocky Harbour and by Glenburnie. The Government of Canada through its Geographical Names Board has a formal procedure for the adoption of place names, those that appear on all government maps and charts. These are sometimes changed and new ones approved, usually depending on local usage. Some of the once important names have disappeared from usage today. In this book, as far as practicable, I use the official names, except where there are obvious errors, or where names familiar to local residents have not yet been formally recognized. As an example of a clear mistake, where the Mudge family lived on the south side of the Bay for a while in the late 1800s was labelled Much’s Point by British surveyors at the end of the nineteenth century. That name persists, as the official designation, on today’s maps and charts, but not in this book!

MISSING VOICES AND COMMON THEMES

The historical record has its biases and common themes. Better-off people appear more frequently, whereas stories of those less fortunate tend to be noted mainly where the law was broken, or when tragedy struck. An example concerns the death in 1846 of Thomas Mayne, a young Englishman who had a business in Bonne Bay. An October gale caught him and two companions in an open boat in which they all perished. The St. John’s Morning Post lavished praise on Mayne—known and respected here . . . a young man of highly respectable connexions—but neither named nor described his companions, who presumably had no such connections. Moreover, earlier generations did not seem as interested in their ancestry as do their descendants. It is not surprising that many people today know little about their forbears, because their own parents and grandparents said not much about them.

Absent from much of the historical documentation are the voices of women. Their role in building the communities of Bonne Bay, as in many other rural settings, is so little recorded that half of the population sometimes appears to have been almost invisible. Yet, it was women who kept home and garden, raised the children, and helped out in the fishery, especially in the lobster canning factories. They were, of course, paid substantially less than men for the same work. But as one older man down the coast put it, I don’t know if they worked harder [than men] but they put in more hours. Housework, combined with raising kids, fish and helping to secure the buoys . . . and haul lumber out of the woods. Women worked at spinning, knitting, rug hooking, and they made butter and lye soap. They worked on the flakes, sorting and turning the drying fish. James Shears once asked, What good was a woman who could not make skin boots, card wool, collect berries for preserves, and tend to the gardens and children when her husband went off to sea?

Women were generally ignored in early census accounts and directories, and when they were mentioned in newspapers, it was usually in connection with weddings, births, deaths, social groups, or occasional tragedy. Few women were prominent in fishery or in business. In the twentieth century, there were heroic nurses in the region: Audrey Jakeman in Trout River, Jane Hutchings in Cow Head, and Myra Bennett in Portland Creek. Some women are remembered among the early schoolteachers, and women were the first leaders in the Salvation Army in Rocky Harbour and Shoal Brook.

When the old-age pension was introduced in Newfoundland in 1911, and for years later, it was primarily for men. As an example of just how unremarkable this arrangement was regarded, when Fred Rowe, a prominent educator and provincial and federal politician who once taught school in Bonne Bay, wrote his 1980 history of the province, he made no comment on this gender bias, as if it were the natural order of things. Indeed, Bonne Bay might well provide another site for the modern feminist project to reclaim women’s voices in history.

A different theme emerging from historical research is the continual tension between centres of economic and political power and communities on the geographic margins. It was ever St. John’s versus the outports, and those on the northwest coast were among the most remote on the Island. In the late 1800s, when Bonne Bay was fast becoming a major centre for the herring fishery, it seldom appeared in the St. John’s newspapers, despite their remarkably good coverage of international events. As the editorial in the Western Star for October 7, 1908, stated, Our interests are not identical to those of the East, nor do the Easterners understand our needs. On the other hand, whereas community leaders and merchants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth complained repeatedly about the lack of government attention to Bonne Bay, the same people in Woody Point were sometimes on the receiving end of criticism from smaller communities within the Bay and along the coast. In the late twentieth century, the situation was reversed, as Rocky Harbour and Norris Point benefited more directly from the coming of the Park than Bonne Bay South, and new jealousies arose. So, what was once the centre became the margin and so on, perhaps ad infinitum.²

Chapter 2

THE BAY IS BORN AND PEOPLE FIRST ARRIVE

There are deer in great plenty, all sorts of furs, excellent harbours, vast quantities of cod, fine rivers abounding with salmon and trout,. . . no fogs, very little bad weather, a trade -wind all summer, excellent conveniences for drying fish . . .

THE LANDSCAPE DEVELOPS

Local histories do not usually begin with an account of how the present landscape came into being, but it is this story that determined the character of the Bay and its surrounds. Were it not for the contrast between the steep, mountainous shoreline to the south and the low-lying coastal plain to the north, the Bay itself might not have formed here. Were it not partly encircled by hills and mountains, shelter would not have been available for those who lived from the sea. The shape, extent, and depth of the Bay itself controlled the development of the fishery. And it is precisely the character of its varied rocks, soils, and landforms that led to national and international recognition of the area as a very special place, and that continues to attract visitors. The complexity of the geological story reflects the many events and processes involved in the long evolution of western Newfoundland. Time and time again there were physical and ecological changes, some imperceptibly slow, as over millions of years the main features and rock types evolved, some rather faster, as the surface of the land was reshaped. How and where the rocks of the region were formed is a story told elsewhere, but a brief outline may help to show why the area is now an outstanding national park.

Behind Gros Morne, Big Hill, and Killdevil Mountain, and on Old Crow itself, are the oldest rocks in the area, gneisses and granites belonging to an eastern piece of the Precambrian Canadian Shield. These form the core of the Long Range Mountains which extend along much of Newfoundland’s West Coast. The mountains on the north side of the Bay, dominated by Gros Morne, consist mainly of sandstones and other sediments deposited some 500 million years ago in a shallow coastal sea about the time the first shellfish evolved. Limestones and shales underlie the coastal plain. One outcrop some ten kilometres north of Bonne Bay has been chosen as the international standard for the boundary between the Cambrian and the Ordovician systems of geological time, a marker with which rocks of similar age around the world are now correlated.

The rocks of the brown, flat-topped Tablelands plateau to the south of Bonne Bay were formed deep beneath the earth’s crust and far to the east of their present location, more than 500 million years ago. When an early forerunner to the Atlantic Ocean closed slowly by plate tectonic movements, a slab of this upper mantle and crust was very slowly skimmed off and pushed westward into position as the Tablelands, rather like a slab of ice is forced over a shallow beach by a spring storm. Geologists from all over the world have come here to study what lay beneath the ancient surface, for these rocks provide a guide to the deep structure of the earth today.

From the top of the Tablelands, Gros Morne, or Killdevil, the view is of a gently rolling, uplifted plain, into which the rivers, valleys, fjords, and bays have been cut. This nearly flat surface, which extends throughout much of Atlantic Canada, was the result of erosion that took place over tens of millions of years. However, the landscape of today was shaped over the past two million years or so by repeated glacial and warmer inter-glacial episodes. At the maximum, ice covered the island, scouring the heights to form a knobbly terrain with much frost-shattered rubble. Ice oozed slowly through the main valleys of the Long Range, scraping their sides and bottoms. These glaciers merged at the foot of the Long Range escarpment and extended out into the sea. The double-armed fjord that is Bonne Bay was scoured by separate glacial streams, which merged as they flowed out to the Gulf. Around 15,000 years ago, the last glaciers began to melt, and by about 9,000 years ago they had disappeared altogether, resulting in a rise of sea level.

The coastal lowlands were first flooded by the sea, so that much of the now inhabited shore of Bonne Bay was submerged. Streams flowing from the recently deglaciated hills dumped vast amounts of sand, gravel, and silt at the water’s edge. Now, when sea level is ten metres or so lower, these deposits provide valuable sources of sand and gravel for new construction. Neddy (Burnt) Hill and the little lighthouse hill in Woody Point would have been islands at one time. The rocky ledge at the entrance to Rocky Harbour would have been completely submerged, as would have been parts of what is now Norris Point. Winter House Brook, Shoal Brook, Youngs Point, and Glenburnie are all built on fans of sand and gravel deposited in stream deltas that became dry land as the sea surface dropped to present levels. The shallow tidal flats at the end of South Arm and the estuary (barachois) of Lomond River represent the upper surface of new deltaic deposits forming today.

Sometime within the past 5,000 years or so, the whole northern side of the Lookout Hills sagged or slumped downwards, creating a series of cliff-like scarps, as successively lower portions of the hillside dropped along steep fractures (Fig. 1). Best seen from the Lobster Cove lighthouse, this has been called the largest landslide in Canada. Although there were probably no people around to witness this event, it would have created huge waves that swept across, into and out of the Bay. High on the steep slopes at the southern entrance to the Bay stand several rock pillars that survived the sagging movements. The most prominent of these is known as the Old Man. An early cleric, the Rev. Ulrich Rule, perhaps in a fit of delirium, described it as having the appearance of the head and shoulders of an elderly man with a garland on his brow. Sometimes when he was downcast, Rule looked up at the Old Man and was comforted. Such a steadfast looking man, and so cheery; and the evening glory about his head, as I have seen it sometimes, makes him seem like one who has reached a perfection attained scarcely this side the grave.

Fig. 1. The Lookout Hill slump as seen from the Lobster Cove Lighthouse. The jagged peak is the Big Lookout, below which the rounded hill is the original summit, which dropped when the whole slope sagged downwards (after a sketch by Ian Brookes).

The geological drama is not yet over for, from time to time, steep

Reviews for The Good and Beautiful Bay

[ulmannc · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a well written book with excellent pictures. The foot notes are even good reading. I have also had the pleasure of meeting Tony in Woody Point. If I read it again, the rating goes up to 5 stars!