Recounting a Shipwreck No one Survived to Tell

Six men boarded the 72-foot fishing vessel the Andrea Gail intended for a late season fishing trip that would end catastrophically. In late October 1991, aware that a storm was brewing, the captain and crew decided to take their swordfish catch and head home from the Grand Banks to Gloucester, Massachusetts. The mother of all […]

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Relocating Newfoundland Outports

Dr. Jeff A. Webb is a professor in the Department of History at Memorial University and author of Observing the Outports: Describing Newfoundland Culture, 1950-1980. I interviewed Dr. Webb for the January 2018 issue of Downhome Magazine (see “Abandoned Architecture As Art: Newfoundland Resettlement In Photographs”). This is our full edited interview. Q. What were […]

Welcome to Little Bay East: A Newfoundland Outport that Offers a View into the Past

Little Bay East, where the Thornhill family has lived for more than one and a half centuries, is situated on the southeastern shores of Newfoundland. It’s an outport fishing community surrounded by other outport fishing communities along the Burin Peninsula on Fortune Bay. When the Thornhills arrived in Newfoundland from northcentral England (Dorsetshire or Dorset as […]

Saltwater Cowboys

I come from a long line of fishers and grew up hearing their stories. Twenty-five years ago this past July, the cod moratorium put some 30,000 island fishermen out of work. My book, Saltwater Cowboys: What Happened to Newfoundlanders When the Cod Fishery Closed, is a nonfiction narrative encompassing memoir and history about the life and death of the commercial cod fishery in Newfoundland.It’s a collection of stories of the people and communities across the island and how life has changed leading up to and since that time