Will Foote’s houseboat
William Gibbons Foote was born in Newfoundland in 1855, the son of William Foote, a sawmiller at Exploits River. It was a tough life of short summers and long, harsh winters. From the 1860s the local economy went into a steep decline as the fishing industry suffered from unending seasons of bad weather.
Like many others in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, William Sr. decided to emigrate with his family to New Zealand in a diaspora that enriched this country with families of mainly Scots ancestry. They settled
