Newfoundland by J. D. Rogers is an essential in your library of Newfoundland Mi’kmaq history. Published in 1911, it is part of A Historical Geography of the British Colonies. I was lucky enough to be given a copy many years ago, and it’s one book I’ve never loaned out. I never wanted to lose it.
Facts, yes, lots of facts. But also insights into the nature of Newfoundland and its peoples.
…it is a history of European exploration and colonial enterprise, relations with the Beothuk and Micmac, conflicts, treaties, settlement policies, administrative changes, and the introduction of institutions. Historical geographic discussions of the advance of settlement and enterprise are only inserted where appropriate. The tragic contact between Europeans and Beothuk and Micmac in Newfoundland, and with Inuit of Labrador, is discussed…
So says John Warkentin about Rogers’ book in his So Vast and Various (2010).
My favourite passage in the book – image, I suppose – is what Rogers calls “Cormack’s historical discovery”:
…while Englishmen were gazing out seawards with their backs turned to the land, Micmacs with their backs turned toward the sea were hurrying to and fro from end to end of the land… and the English ignorance of what they had been doing was due not to any difference between Indian and European methods, but to the abandonment by Englishmen of European methods in colonizing Newfoundland. [162-163]
By that, he means that, unlike the other regions that they colonized, Britain was concerned only with the sea around Newfoundland. They had no interest in using and occupying the land itself. The island was seen, as William Knox said in 1793, only as “a great ship moored near the fishing banks for the convenience of English fishermen.”
Despite a ban on permanent settlement, some early fishers remained year round. But they too looked out to the sea and not very far inland. As Rogers put it about those early British settlers, “they are wedded with the sea and ‘their children’s eyes change colour with the sea’” (237).
Fishery made Newfoundland unique
Rogers also authored the volume on Canada in A Historical Geography of the British Empire, a series compiled by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas. The two volumes resulted from the real-life situation of Newfoundland. “When this series was projected it seemed likely that before its completion Newfoundland would have been absorbed into the Dominion of Canada… But Newfoundland has not been absorbed, and still remains sui generis and an exception to the rule in the British Empire” (iii).
This exceptionality, he says, is due to the process of colonization, and the reason for it. The fishery, especially its bountifulness. Colonization sees change for the indigenous peoples, obviously, but also for the colonizers. Resources available change due to depletion, discovery or changing needs. Thus occupations and settlement patterns also change. Except in Newfoundland.
Indeed, there are few other places in the world where fishing could have continued, if all the settlers, who followed in the wake of all the fishermen, had become fishermen. It continued and continues in Newfoundland, first because the fisheries are practically inexhaustible, secondly because creeks and nooks in or from which fishing can be carried on by settlers are practically innumerable. [vii]
It is that last part, about creeks and nooks, that increased conflict between settlers and Mi’kmaq as they began competing for resources. That, Rogers could see happening as European settlers finally began looking inland. What hadn’t happened and he couldn’t foresee was the fishing industry saying ‘hold my beer’ and successfully wiping out that “inexhaustible” supply of fish by the late 20th century. That required, like nothing had before, a complete change in the island’s economy and way of life.
The early reliance by both year-round settlers and annual fishing fleets on seemingly never-ending cod stocks, Rogers says, meant that “the colony was something more than a fishing ground, and something less than a colony, in the sense in which the word colony is generally used” (vii). A colonization twilight, to borrow a word Rogers uses to describe Newfoundland’s connection to the European world.
Rogers, barrister and historian
So who was this teller of Newfoundland’s story? John Davenport Rogers was by occupation a barrister. He was born on 6 February 1857, the third son of Rev. John Rogers and Charlotte Victoria Newbold. They lived at Stanage Park near Knighton, Powys on the Wales-England border.
Rogers studied at Oxford and was called to the bar in 1883. In addition to Newfoundland and Labrador, he wrote about Europe,. Canada and Australia. J. D. Rogers died on 27 August 1914 in Pimlico, London. At that time, he shared the family’s residence in St. George’s Square with his sister Harriet.
In the book itself and to the best of my googling ability, I could find no indication that J. D. Rogers ever visited Newfoundland. Despite that, he outlines centuries of its history. And, even better, he evokes its nature and that of its peoples, both those indigenous to it and those who came from away.
J. D. Rogers’ Newfoundland is available in reprint paperback on Amazon. So too is his Canada volume. You can also get So Vast and Various: Interpreting Canada’s regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogers is one of seven geographers of Canada John Warkentin looks at. For other books I consider valuable, see my Newfoundland Mi’kmaq Books.
