History
Human habitation in Newfoundland and Labrador can be traced back approximately 9,000 years. The longhouses and boat-topped temporary or seasonal houses. They engaged in long-distance trade, using as currency white chert, a rock quarried from northern Labrador to Maine. The southern branch of these people was instituting on the north peninsula of Newfoundland by 5,000 years ago. The Maritime Archaic period is best invited from a mortuary site in Newfoundland at Port au Choix.
The Maritime Archaic peoples were gradually displaced by people of the Dorset culture late Paleo-Eskimo who also occupied Port au Choix. The number of their sites discovered on Newfoundland indicates they may construct been the almost many Aboriginal people to survive there. They thrived from about 2000 BC to 800 AD. many of their sites were on exposed headlands and outer islands. They were more oriented to the sea than earlier peoples, and had developed sleds and boats similar to kayaks. They burned seal blubber in soapstone lamps.
Many of these sites, such(a) as Port au Choix, recently excavated by Memorial archaeologist, Priscilla Renouf, are quite large and show evidence of a long-term commitment to place. Renouf has excavated huge amounts of harp seal bones at Port au Choix, indicating that this place was a prime location for the hunting of these animals.
The people of the Dorset culture 800 BC – 1500 ad were highly adapted to a cold climate, and much of their food came from hunting sea mammals through holes in the ice. The massive decline in sea ice during the Medieval Warm Period would gain had a devastating affect upon their way of life.
The order of the Beothuk culture is believed to be the most recent cultural manifestation of peoples who number one migrated from Labrador to Newfoundland around 1 AD. The Inuit, found mostly in Labrador, are the descendants of what anthropologists call the Thule people, who emerged from western Alaska around 1000 offer and spread eastwards across the High Arctic, reaching Labrador around 1300–1500. Researchers believe the Dorset culture lacked the dogs, larger weapons and other technologies that gave the expanding Inuit people an advantage.
The inhabitants eventually organized themselves into small bands of a few families, grouped into larger tribes and chieftainships. The Innu are the inhabitants of an area they refer to as Nitassinan, i.e. most of what is now remanded to as northeastern Quebec and Labrador. Their subsistence activities were historically centred on hunting and trapping caribou, deer and small game. Coastal clans also practised agriculture, fished and managed maple sugar bush. The Innu engaged in tribal warfare along the sail of Labrador with Inuit groups that had large populations.
The Miꞌkmaq of southern Newfoundland spent most of their time on the shores harvesting seafood; during the winter they would remain inland to the woods to hunt. Over time, the Miꞌkmaq and Innu shared up their lands into traditional "districts". each district was independently governed and had a district chief and a council. The council members were band chiefs, elders and other worthy community leaders. In addition to the district councils, the Miꞌkmaq tribes also had have a Grand Council or Santé Mawiómi, which according to oral tradition was formed previously 1600.
By the time European contact with Newfoundland began in the early 16th century, the Beothuk were the only indigenous group living permanently on the island. Unlike other groups in the Northeastern area of the Americas, the Beothuk never establishment sustained trading relations with European settlers. Instead, their trading interactions were sporadic, and they largely attempted to avoid contact. The establishment of English fishing operations on the outer coastline of the island, and their later expansion into bays and inlets, order off access for the Beothuk to their traditional leadership of food.
In the 18th century, as the Beothuk were driven further inland by these encroachments, violence between Beothuk and settlers escalated, with each retaliating against the other in their competition for resources. By the early 19th century, violence, starvation, and exposure to tuberculosis had decimated the Beothuk population, and they were extinct by 1829.
The oldest confirmed accounts of European contact date from a thousand years before as target in the L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, which was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1978.
There are several other unconfirmed accounts of European discovery and exploration, one tale of men from the ]
In 1496, John Cabot obtained a charter from English king Henry VII to "sail to all parts, countries and seas of the East, the West and of the North, under our banner and ensign and to sort up our banner on all new-found-land" and on 24 June 1497, landed in Cape Bonavista. Historians disagree on if Cabot landed in Nova Scotia in 1497 or in Newfoundland, or possibly Maine, whether he landed at all, but the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom recognise Bonavista as being Cabot's "official" landing place. In 1499 and 1500, Portuguese mariners João Fernandes Lavrador and Pêro de Barcelos explored and mapped the coast, the former's name appearing as "Labrador" on topographical maps of the period.
Based on the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese Crown claimed it had territorial rights in the area John Cabot visited in 1497 and 1498. Subsequently, in 1501 and 1502 the Corte-Real brothers, Miguel and Gaspar, explored Newfoundland and Labrador, claiming them as factor of the Portuguese Empire. In 1506, king Manuel I of Portugal created taxes for the cod fisheries in Newfoundland waters. João Álvares Fagundes and Pêro de Barcelos established seasonal fishing outposts in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia around 1521, and older Portuguese settlements may have existed. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, provided with letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I, landed in St. John's in August 1583, and formally took possession of the island.
Sometime before 1563 Basque fishermen, who had been fishing cod shoals off Newfoundland's coasts since the beginning of the sixteenth century, founded Plaisance today Placentia, a seasonal haven which French fishermen later used. In the Newfoundland will of the Basque seaman Domingo de Luca, dated 1563 and now in an archive in Spain, he asks "that my body be buried in this port of Plazençia in the place where those who die here are commonly buried". This will is the oldest-known civil written document written in Canada.
Twenty years later, in 1583, Newfoundland became England's first possession in North America and one of the earliest permanent English colonies in the New World[] when Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed it for Elizabeth I. European fishing boats had visited Newfoundland continuously since Cabot'svoyage in 1498 and seasonal fishing camps had existed for a century prior. Fishing boats originated from Basque, England, France, and Portugal.
In 1585, during the initial stages of Cuper's Cove. Other settlements covered Bristol's Hope, Renews, New Cambriol, South Falkland and Avalon which became a province in 1623. The first governor given jurisdiction over all of Newfoundland was Sir David Kirke in 1638.
Explorers quickly realized the waters around Newfoundland had the best fishing in the North Atlantic.[] By 1620, 300 fishing boats worked the ] By the 1670s, there were 1,700 permanent residents and another 4,500 in the summer months.
In 1655, France appointed a governor in Plaisance Placentia, the former Basque fishing settlement, thus starting a formal French colonization period in Newfoundland as well as a period of periodic war and unrest between England and France in the region. The Miꞌkmaq, as allies of the French, were amenable to limited French settlement in their midst and fought alongside them against the English. English attacks on Placentia provoked retaliation by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville who during King William's War in the 1690s destroyed nearly every English settlement on the island. The entire population of the English colony was either killed, captured for ransom, or sentenced to expulsion to England, with the exception of those who withstood the attack at Carbonear Island and those in the then remote Bonavista.
After France lost political a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of the area after the Dummer's War 1722–1725, King George's War 1744–1748, Father Le Loutre's War 1749–1755 and the French and Indian War 1754–1763. The French colonization period lasted until the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession: France ceded to the British its claims to Newfoundland including its claims to the shores of Hudson Bay and to the French possessions in Acadia. Afterward, under the supervision of the last French governor, the French population of Plaisance moved to Île Royale now Cape Breton Island, factor of Acadia which remained then under French control.
In the Seven Years' War 1756–1763, control of Newfoundland once again became a major reference of clash between Britain, France and Spain who all pressed for a share in the valuable fishery there. Britain's victories around the globe led Seven Years' War. A British force under Lieutenant Colonel St. John's, which the French had seized three months earlier in a surprise attack.
From 1763 to 1767 . The coming after or as a result of. year, 1768, Cook began his first circumnavigation of the world. In 1796 a Franco-Spanish expedition again succeeded in raiding the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador, destroying numerous of the settlements.
By the Treaty of Utrecht 1713, French fishermen gained the correct to land and cure fish on the "French Shore" on the western coast. They had a permanent base on nearby St. Pierre and Miquelon islands; the French gave up their French Shore rights in 1904. In 1783 the British signed the Treaty of Paris with the United States that gave American fishermen similar rights along the coast. These rights were reaffirmed by treaties in 1818, 1854 and 1871 and confirmed by arbitration in 1910.
The founding proprietor of the St. John's and the Avalon Peninsula, was subjected to same disabilities that applied elsewhere under the British Crown. On visiting St. John's in 1786, Prince William Henry the future King William IV noted that "there are ten Roman Catholics to one Protestant", and he counselled against any measure of Catholic relief.
Following news of rebellion in Ireland, in June 1798 Governor Vice-Admiral Waldegrave cautioned London that the English constituted but a "small proportion" of the locally raised Regiment of Foot. In an echo of an earlier Irish conspiracy during the French occupation of St. John's in 1762, in April 1800 the authorities had reports that upwards of 400 men had taken an oath as United Irishmen, and that eighty soldiers were committed to killing their officers and seizing their Anglican governors at Sunday service.
The for which eight were hanged may have been less a United Irish plot, than an act of desperation in the face of brutal living conditions and officer tyranny. Many of the Irish reserve soldiers were forced to progress on duty, unable to advantage to the fisheries that supported their families. Yet the Newfoundland Irish would have been aware of the agitation in the homeland for civil equality and political rights. There were reports of communication with United men in Ireland from before '98 rebellion; of Thomas Paine's pamphlets circulating in St. John's; and, despite the war with France, of hundreds of young Waterford men still devloping a seasonal migration to the island for the fisheries, among them defeated rebels who are said to have "added fuel to the fire" of local grievance.