Come Near at your Peril: The .1 Visitor's Guide to the Island of Newfoundland

Melvin Baker is an archivist and historian at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and the co-editor of Dictionary of Newfoundland and
Labrador Biography.

In this updated edition of his 1992 guidebook, Patrick O’Flaherty
writes, “if you want Anne of Green Gables scenery, then go to
Cavendish in Prince Edward Island. PEI is a pretty little island.
Newfoundland is not a pretty little island.” Instead, Newfoundland
offers a “cold pastoral” and is a “good venue for wilderness
experience: camping, backpacking, canoeing, hiking, bird-watching [and
so on].”

The first part of the book provides an overview of Newfoundland
history; descriptions of the cultural and linguistic peculiarities of
its people; guidance on where to eat (“If you come here with a
cholesterol problem,” O’Flaherty warns, “you will be sent back
home in a casket”); and information on sport fishing and hunting, as
well as on the growing commercial arts and crafts industry. In the
remainder of the book, O’Flaherty takes the reader on a regional tour
of communities using the island section of the Trans-Canada Highway as
his reference point, with forays into the bays, capes, and outports on
those roads that branch off the main highway.

What sets this book apart from others of its kind, including
government-produced guidebooks (which, says O’Flaherty, are often
“full of official bluster and nonsense about scenery, history, the
great outdoors, heritage, etc.”), are the keen, insightful, and
bracing observations its author brings to bear on Newfoundland past and
present.