3-078-232 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches in Newfoundland: early Spring in St. John's Harbour, 1890. 'The island discovered in 1497 by the Bristol merchant Sebastian Cabot...and colonised by several parties of English adventurers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is situate near the south-east coast of Labrador, at the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence...The inhabitants have chiefly devoted their attention to the cod-fishery, which is mainly carried on in the open Atlantic, over the vast shoals called the Banks of Newfoundland, extending six or seven hundred miles south-east of the island, and 250 miles broad: this, with the seal-hunting, the salmon and herring fisheries, also the new trade in canned lobsters from the western shore, and the working of some copper-mines, supplies yearly exports to the value of more than five million dollars. The whole population is under 200,000 of British, Irish, and French origin, the native Indian race being extinct...It is...the oldest British colony...The photographs by Mr. S. H. Parsons, of St. John's, and sent to us by Mr. W. C. Bourchier, of H.M.S. Lion, from which our Engravings are copied, represent some aspects of the Newfoundland shores in winter and early spring: the breaking- up of the ice in St. John's harbour'. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.