Ferryland: The Colony of Avalonia

Olaf Uwe Janzen is a professor of history at Memorial University. He is
the reviews editor of The Northern Mariner and the editor of Northern
Seas.

By the time this review is published, it will be too late to discourage
sales of this book. That is too bad, for Bernard Fardy’s attempt to
use the particular experience of Ferryland to explain how Newfoundland
was settled in the 17th and 18th centuries is riddled with mistakes from
beginning to end—factual errors, errors of omission, internal
contradictions, and errors that surely stem from simple carelessness.
Thus, we are told that Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots
were sisters, that Virginia was founded by Puritans, that the Thirteen
Colonies created the United States in 1738, that the French vacated
Newfoundland’s south coast after 1762, that the Acadians were uprooted
from Nova Scotia after 1713 and that many then settled on
Newfoundland’s west coast, that the Treaty Shore was redefined in
1763, that Appledore and Barnstaple are in Dorset, that the French
established the colony of Plaisance with the permission of Charles II,
that the Cupid’s colony was “burned ... to the ground” by pirates
in 1612—it is impossible to list all the mistakes in so brief a
review, so these few must suffice to support the point.

Many of the errors stem from a failure to use the recent scholarly
literature; Fardy writes with either a profound unfamiliarity with the
essential literature or a complete indifference to it. Too many of his
sources are woefully out of date, like Prowse’s History of
Newfoundland (1895), which he cites frequently. Absent from the
bibliography are the published works of Gillian Cell, David Quinn, Luca
Codignola, Thomas Coakley, and Raymond Lahey, the Historical Atlas of
Canada, and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Peter Pope’s
brilliant Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth
Century (2004) is conspicuously missing, as is John Krugler’s English
and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (2004).
Anyone wishing to learn about Ferryland should turn to these sources.