Dr. David J. Clarke

Newfoundland is an island of small towns and villages, and it is poor. That meant that, for much of its history, there were few to record what happened there. This was particularly true of the "outports" -- the places away from the metropolis of St. John's. Even when the stories of the past are known, there have been few to gather the history and set it out.

So I was thrilled to discover that there was a history of "Fogo, Twillingate, Moreton's Harbour," and the other islands of the north, famously recorded in the Newfoundland song "I'ze the B'y That Builds the Boat."

Sadly, the actual book was a disappointment. Some of that is its pure quirkiness -- author Clarke, for instance, doesn't know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns, as witness the capitalization of the word "Wife" in this sentence on page 153: "Earle's Wife Catherine (nee Nosworthy) died two years earlier...." On the next page, we read "Henry wed Amelia Rolls, a Daughter of merchant James Rolls of Barr'd Islands." This is a consistent usage: nouns indicating familial relationships are capitalized. Since there are a lot of family stories in here, that's a lot of excess capitalization -- and for me, at least, it really upset the flow, because I kept wondering what the significance is. There isn't any significance (I've never seen another Newfoundland author write that way; it's just an idiosyncrasy), but it made me constantly stop and wonder why those words were capitalized. For me, I find this much more grating than, say, spelling errors.

But the real problem is the book's organization. It's organized into chapters and sections, but it isn't a coherent history. Some of the chapters are organized geographically (places on Fogo Island, e.g.), some are based on historical events (the story of the First Newfoundland Regiment), some about particular people ("Georgina Stirling, Nightingale of the Isles"). And there is no index. Want to look up something you read earlier? Tough. You just have to re-read the whole book, or at least the whole chapter. Given that I'm trying to use this as a reference guide to the history of the Isles, it's almost hopeless. I had to read it, hope I noticed important names as they went past -- and hope I didn't fall asleep due to the soporific style and the general disorganization.

I know of no other book with equivalent content. The Isles deserve a book, and need a book, and this is what they have. If you're as interested in that history as I am, you'll want this book. But be prepared for a hard slog.

Newfoundlanders are a stoic people. If you're going to finish this book, you'll probably have to be stoic, too.… (altro)