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Falling in love with Cupids
Unearthing Newfoundland’s first English settlement
BY DARCY RHYNO
When our tour group enters the Cupids Legacy Centre, we’re greeted with the sweet strains of Edward Ryan’s accordion. The centre’s friendly lead interpreter plays until everyone is gathered. Setting the accordion aside, he begins the story of his beloved Cupids, a village at the base of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula about an 85-kilometre drive from St. John’s.
Sailing out of Bristol, England, in August 1610 and funded by a group of London and Bristol merchants known as the Newfoundland Company, John Guy led his band of settlers to Cuper’s Cove, a location he’d selected on a visit two years earlier. Over time, the name morphed into Cupids. This modern interpretation centre opened in 2010 on the 400th anniversary of Guy’s arrival. The year before, the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall visited the settlement. Why all the fuss about a single ship delivering a few people to a remote corner of the continent?
“Aboard the Fleming, there would have been 40 people, including John Guy, all their cattle and supplies on a ship the size of a school bus,” says Ryan. To give a sense of the cramped quarters, he lists off the Fleming’s supplies: blacksmith and carpentry tools, shovels, axes, muskets, crossbows, barrels of food, pigs, poultry, and goats. “It would have been a very tightly packed ship, not to mention the trip across the Atlantic would have taken three to four weeks. You can only imagine.”
Interpreter Heather Burry guides our group through Spracklin House, cautioning us to duck through the low doorways. Built in 1847, this house sits on stone salvaged from the John Guy settlement established on this site more than two centuries earlier. The main attraction is a diorama of John Guy’s settlement, its remains unearthed behind this house.
Outside, up a narrow, winding path, Burry leads us past recently excavated stone foundations to a frame-only ghost structure on the footprint of the building at the centre of the 16 structures that once stood here, including a blacksmith shop and a brewhouse. Dorset, Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Viking: these peoples and others lived on Newfoundland well before English settlers arrived on Canada’s fourth largest island (16th in the world). But, says Burry, this tiny foothold four centuries old makes it the second oldest continuously-settled English community in North America, behind only Jamestown, Virginia. John Guy’s attempted colonization in Cupids was difficult and fleeting.
“We know that in addition to the ones that we found, there were two sawpits and a gristmill.” Burry explains that a sawpit is a human powered sawmill. One man stands in the pit, the other above ground inside the timber house, and together they operate a long ripsaw that cuts logs into lumber. “There was a wooden palisade built around everything. We also have uncovered stone defence works and mounts for three cannons to protect the colony.”
Guy chose this location for the good soil and the tall trees. The colonialists cut timber to build the settlement and even a ship, the Endeavour, completed in 1610 or 1611. The vessel was to sail from Conception Bay around to Trinity Bay, where they traded with the Beothuk. Records show that they shared a meal with the Indigenous people in 1612. Despite this friendly encounter, disease and conflict killed the last of the Beothuk by 1830.
As for the colonists, Burry says written records speak volumes. John Guy wrote that Thomas Percy died of thought. Burry explains, “Thomas killed somebody before he left to come over. He didn’t tell anyone what he had done. The day before he died, he confessed it to John Guy.
So, he died of thought.” Smallpox killed others. One died of a bruise suggesting internal bleeding, and another of stiffness in the knees that kept one colonist bedridden for 10 weeks, prompting Guy to assign his demise to laziness.
None of these single causes likely led to the end of Guy’s settlement, however. “We did find that the palisade wall was breached by cannons,” says Burry. “We found cannonballs, so at some time it was attacked.” No one knows for sure who the assailants were during those attacks.
Whatever the causes, the colony of Cuper’s Cove inside those palisade walls likely ended around 1621. But these shores were never completely abandoned There are gaps in the timeline, but in the first census of Newfoundland in 1836, some 840 people lived in the Cupids area. When you fall in love with a little corner of Newfoundland, there’s no going back.So, he died of thought.” Smallpox killed others. One died of a bruise suggesting internal bleeding, and another of stiffness in the knees that kept one colonist bedridden for 10 weeks, prompting Guy to assign his demise to laziness.
CUPID’S TIMELINE
1608 John Guy visits Newfoundland as its first governor.
1610 Guy and colonialists establish North America’s second English settlement.
1612 Threatened by pirates, Guy abandons a second Newfoundland settlement.
1613 Nicholas Guy is born, the first English child born in Newfoundland.
1614 Guy returns permanently to England where he was elected Mayor of Bristol.
1629 John Guy dies.
1838 Records show 16 ships with 365 men hunted seal from Cupids.
1847 Workers build the Spracklin House.
1910 Newfoundland issues a commemorative John Guy stamp.
1910 Villigars sew a giant Union Jack flag to commemorate Cupids’ 300th anniversary.
1983 A replica of the giant flag flies in the village, continuing today.
1995 The Cupids Historical Society hires archeologist Bill Gilbert to search for the Guy settlement. In eight days, he discovers its location.
2009 The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall visit.
2010 The Cupids Legacy Centre opens for the 400th anniversary.
2024 Excavations of the Guy colony continue, unearthing 170,000 artifacts to date.
