Was, as Prowse confessed in his foreword, not complete, it could not be at even ten times its eight hundred pages, for the instant he finished writing it a moment of history went unrecorded and even in what was written It read like some great argument written to confound appeals to higher courts, though the argument was often lost amid the mass of detail. Judgments rendered and explained, effects painstakingly traced back to causes. He was as awed by Prowse's prowess with numbers, his tables, graphs, charts and columns of statistics, as he was by Prowse's prose, which had the conviction and lucid eloquence of court decisions, It was one of the world's great histories, he said, though he doubted it would ever be so acknowledged outside of Newfoundland. One of my father's most prized possessions, for all the scorn he heaped on Newfoundland, was his copy ofĪ History of Newfoundland by Judge D. Upon leaving Newfoundlandįor England, he takes with him a piece of turf and a small twig, symbols of ownership which, unlike him, remain afloat when his ship sinks in the mid-Atlantic. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, sets out in search of a passage to the Orient, but settles for claiming Newfoundland in the name of Queen Elizabeth I. This explains his later remark, inscrutable to many, that the quality he prizes most highly in a sailor is gullibility. In 1534, Jacques Cartier circumnavigates Newfoundland, proving it to be an island, which he manages to convince his crew is as great an achievement as doing what he set out to do, namely, discover a passage Cabot leaves for Newfoundland and is never seen again. Henry VII that he has found the land of the Grand Khan and will surely find the Grand Khan's kingdom if Henry will finance a second expedition. He believes he has found Cathay, now known as China, to find a shortcut to which he had set out thirty-five days before. John Cabot discovers the island on June 24, 1497. We intend our history to be the story of the island of Newfoundland since the geological formation which bears that name first rose above the surface of the sea.
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