Treasures Of Canada

By Alan Samuel and John De Visser

This tome is an extensive record of Canadas treasures including art, architecture, historical sites, and spots of natural beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Nov 1, 1998
• ISBN: 9781459710863

Book preview

contributions.

Introduction

When we began work on this book nearly twenty years ago, we had only a vague idea of what we would find when we reached out across the country to identify the national heritage. The research itself shaped the book. The assembling of Canada's treasures — art objects, architecture, historical sites, spots of natural beauty — was, of course, an enormous task involving many people across the country. Practical limitations, aesthetic considerations, and varying notions of treasures forced literally thousands of decisions by contributors, photographers, text and art editors, designers. Many of these decisions were very difficult, and some of the treasures selected were doubtless reflections of individual preferences. But to a much larger extent we found that most decisions could be — had to be — dictated by the nature of Canada itself. There is a rationale to the country as a whole and to each of its parts that makes judgments, comparisons, selections possible, almost inevitable.

When we saw the finished book, we realized that it was something of a celebration of Canada. We did not plan it that way, but we found that it was very much a product of what we had learned about Canada, what we discovered we felt about Canada, what we found others felt.

Over the years, we often looked back at the great adventure the creation of this book gave us, and, although we knew the country was changing with the passage of time, we also knew that the fundamentals of her heritage had a stability which brought expansion rather than radical change. As we set about considering revisions in our text, and incorporating the additions to our heritage which the years had brought, the nature of Canadian life once again dictated what we would do: we could not simply eliminate some of what we had in order to make space for the new. The problem led us to a complete redesign of the work, in order to control the size of what was already too heavy a book for some, and also, in order to increase the readability of the text. The result is a completely different volume, but one which for all its difference is still the self-portrait of Canada as viewed by many Canadians.

Now as before, what people in different parts of Canada single out as treasures shows more about the nature of the country's regions than all the treatises ever written by learned economists, than all the dissertations by sociologists and political scientists. To know what a Newfoundlander, an Ontarian, and Albertan holds dear is to understand a great deal about Newfoundland, Ontario, Alberta.

Air travel makes arrival in Canada sudden. In earlier days, the slow progress of a ship up the St. Lawrence gradually accustoms the traveller to the expanse of sky and water that penetrates to the heart of the continent. The river is viewed from Notre Dame du Portage, Gaspé, Quebec.

These variations reflect more than Canada's proverbial regional differences. Each province is different from its nearest neighbours. Each province has its own integrity. Each province has its own history and its own culture, and each province has produced its own kind of treasures. Within each province there are, of course, regional differences, but these seem minor when compared with the unity of one province as contrasted to another. Ontario's Niagara Peninsula seems different from Eastern Ontario, but neither could possibly be in New Brunswick, in Manitoba, or British Columbia.

Despite these striking provincial differences, we found that there are ties — often very strong ties — which bind us all together. There are the obvious ties of geography, such as the Canadian Shield, which offers the same promise to Newfoundland as to Saskatchewan. But equally important are the ties of history and the common experience. The Loyalist Trail is not limited to New Brunswick; it winds through Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario. The Hudson's Bay and North West companies have left their marks on Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. The actions of Louis Riel are reflected in the museums of the Red River and the historical markers of Alberta as well as in the tombstones of Batoche. British Columbia is linked to the Yukon by the memories of successive gold rushes and, like the prairie provinces, was shaped by the great immigrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, while the whole country feels the great impact of the hundreds of thousands of new people who have arrrived in the last two decades. All of today's metropolises have been transformed by the influx of immigrants since the Second World War.

The list could go on and on. Its importance to this book is that these common experiences have left behind tangible treasures — buildings, paintings, a myriad of carefully preserved objects — that are common symbols with meaning and value for all Canadians, everyday sights that go deeper than consciousness to impress upon all of us that we are a community with a common past.

And although history is the mother of us all, her sister muses have also had enormous influence on the formation of the Canadian spirit. Emily Carr's works are as much treasured in Montreal and Calgary as in Vancouver and Victoria.

The paintings of the Toronto-based Group of Seven stir feelings of national pride and identity throughout the country. Quebec sent her architecture to the West with her people, and the East admires Dorothy Knowles' prairies. Alex Colville, whose paintings are treasured as much outside Canada as here, has given us all art for everyday in our centennial coinage. And everywhere is the common appreciation of the land — the mountainous Pacific coast, the Rockies, the prairies, the northern barrens, the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence — that has given us our common heritage.

This is not to say that all Canadians agree on the relative importance of the riches of our country. Some of us have more feeling for the land, while others find greater value in paintings and sculptures. For some, homes, churches, and public buildings best symbolize Canada, while to others, the arts and crafts of our native peoples have greater meaning. To some, our technical achievements — dams, power stations, bridges, canals, inventions — are our most valuable possessions, and there are those to whom the great works that our riches have allowed us to import from abroad are the measure of our success as a nation. But this very multiplicity of possible values is a demonstration of the nature of the country.

The sense of Canada and her treasures is constantly changing and growing, a development which emerges in subtle differences between the contents of the first and second editions of this book. Today there is a greater awareness of the legitimacy of the culture of our aboriginal peoples, and a greater recognition of the role they have to play in our future. Our cities are yet bigger, matching in the quality of recent architecture the best anywhere in the world. Yet with all the novelty we can see in the country, we are adding to are our heritage, rather than changing it, as our culture expands to include the ideals and values of more and more people, so that our treasures include the new without losing the traditions of hundreds of years.

Taken all together these various treasures represent Canada — her people, her land, her culture. They show the variations of her regions and the diversity of her accomplishments, the individuality of her many peoples and the richness of the different strains of her culture. Above all, they are common symbols. Through the treasures of Canada we sense our commonality as a people; in them, we share a common pride and pleasure.

Canada

Canada is a human accomplishment still being won against great obstacles. From the beginning, the magnificence of the land, waters and forests was countered by the savagery of the climate, with the sweltering heat of summer often coming almost immediately on the heels of the bitter cold and snow of long, exhausting winters. From the start of human occupation of the land that is now Canada, people were forced to find ways of accommodating themselves to the vagaries of terrain and weather. Even today, millenia after the first men and women settled here, Canadian culture encompasses a vast scope from Inuit civilization in the tundra of the North to mild coastal living in the West, from sea-lashed fishing villages in the outports of the East to the cities and farms planted in territory that was wilderness only a century ago.

Youth, as well as struggle, is a hallmark of Canada. Even the oldest cultures here look to the future. In 1993, the Inuit of the East began to fashion a new government and territory in the Arctic, on land which never knew such borders or concepts. Age-old aboriginal respect for the land and environment is now creating a modern government which makes the preservation of nature its paramount objective. In the cities and on the farms of what is to Canadians, their South, millions of people are struggling to adapt patterns imposed by nature to the imperatives presented by the radically new creation of a one world which no one could have envisioned a generation ago, when Canada celebrated the first hundred years of modern nationality.

Across the world, Canadians are often thought of as having an exceptional concern with preserving the natural environment, and at home they are told that others judge their quality of life to be among the highest in the world, if not the highest. Across the country are the products of human endeavor that prove both these judgements to be true. The finest and wildest national parks in the world grace the same provinces that boast vibrant modern cities and some of the most brilliant and innovative architecture to be seen anywhere. And the newly-built rests on a heritage long predating Confederation in 1867. There are homes, public buildings, and arts and crafts, some of which reach back to the culture of the aboriginal nations that were here before the first Europeans arrived.

The newcomers, then and today, thought of Canada as a land to be explored, exploited. Many still think of Canada's history as a story of exploration and settlement. That is certainly an important part of the heritage. People settled on land which initially richly rewarded the probings of Hudson's Bay Company agents, and brought their European traditions to a wilderness which up to then had encountered people willing to let it be. Now, however, the human mood was more aggressive: push the forest back, make the land serve human needs and produce food for people, give up its trees and minerals and furs to European commerce, to make the vast new territory yield its treasures of natural wealth to the older civilizations across the sea.

Some of rural Quebec, like this old farm on the Gaspé peninsula, has changed little since the original settlers built their first homes.

Yet, as the settlers came to wrest their riches, the land remade them. The French habitants were forced into the mould that made them ‘Canadiens,’ as the great St. Lawrence set the parameters of settlement and farming. The land and climate created a Francophone culture clearly North American. Elsewhere, the new farms cut from the grasslands of the prairies recreated some of the patterns of Eastern Europe, but they grew from the start out of the optimism which people brought to the New World. And as the large cities grew to make Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, they developed as North American cities. They became world centres only in the twentieth century, and they were able to select the best out of the new world experience.

For all it shares with others on this continent, however, Canada still has its own heritage and traditions, forged out of its own experience. They are apparent in buildings, festivals, museums and historic sites all across the country. The record people have left on the land shows their struggles and triumphs, from the first traces of earliest human settlement to the monuments of conflict and war which left the country both French and English after 1759. The determination to be themselves, to try their own destiny, not yet manifest, shows in the history of combat with the Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a half-century before Canada was to be a nation itself. When that brief war ravaged the border regions, Canadian settlements in southern Ontario were, at best, frontier towns along the great lakes at the edge of the great northern woods, with occasional farms and log cabins thrust a few miles into the interior. There area few early buildings still standing today which either survived the destruction of war or lay outside the theatre of combat, and these are among the most valued symbols of what many Ontarians see as their original British heritage.

In all the years before Confederation, and for almost a century after, Canada forged west. The heritage of that venture survives in private and public architecture in regions far from the original European settlements, in territories some of which which only became provinces with the advent of the twentieth century. In a world which was, to the more settled Canadians of the Maritimes, Quebec and Ontario, remote and unattractive, Hudson's Bay factors built forts and trading posts, started towns, and took over lands as the government arranged treaties with the aboriginal peoples and put them on reserves. Shortly after the older provinces created the new Confederation, the new trading and agricultural centers were shaken by the Riel Rebellion in Manitoba and the renewal of conflict with the Métis in 1885. The end of that conflict brought peace to Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but its outcome moulded the politics of the nation for generations. Its carefully preserved sites and artifacts show how fundamentally the religious, linguistic and territorial disputes of the past have influenced the attitudes and ideas of the developing nation.

During all those years a large part of the population and the national government saw Canada as essentially British. Although Quebec was allowed to remain French and Roman Catholic, the rest of the country went a different way. Ottawa's government and ambitious parliament buildings, patterned after Westminster, inspired political and architectural construction at provincial levels. Great neoclassical legislative monuments rose, in Victoria at the end of the ninteeenth century, in Winnipeg, Regina and Edmonton at the beginning of the next. Canada jumped into Britain's wars, in South Africa and in Europe, and the great conflict of World War One forged a new sense of national power and promise, and left even more monuments, in Canada and in Europe, to Canadian military achievements.

However, even with all the loyalty to Victoria, Edward and George, Canada was changing in many ways. Except in British Columbia, the new populations in the west looked back to European origins other than British: Ukrainian, Polish, Icelandic and many other groups accepted Ottawa's invitation to settle the prairies. Refugees from religious persecution, like the Doukobors from Russia, brought their traditions — and some conflict — to the new world. Even Quebec began to change, as Francophones began to develop an ambition to assert themselves over the British culture still dominating the political and economic life of the province. And in British Columbia, the large numbers of immigrant workers from China and Japan had produced a generation or more born in Canada, but not yet accepted as fully part of Canada. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the potential of all this exploded.

This United Church, built in 1819 by Loyalists in Phillipsburg, Quebec., served as part of the underground railway for slaves escaping from the United States.

In 1945, much of the old countries which many Canadian still called home lay in ruins. France, Poland, the Netherlands and Germany were prostrate after five years of occupation and war, while England, the Ukraine and Russia had defended themselves at vast expense and with horrendous losses. In Canada, as in the United States, the cities and economy were intact, and the population eagerly participated in the post-war prosperity. Canada, a small country, was inevitably drawn into the American orbit as the Cold War developed, but her British and European affinities kept her different nevertheless. Loyal to their European roots, Canadians welcomed a new immigration, this time of people of more Mediterranean origin. Toronto got thousands of Italians and Portuguese; Montreal got them too, along with French-speaking North Africans, and other cities shared the influx in lesser measure. The newcomers remade the cities, not only importing their cuisines, but even remaking streetscapes. Staid Englanders looked in surprise as the old, red-brick faces of the homes of Toronto workers erupted in bright yellows, reds, greens and blues. They viewed with greater approval the neat little vegetable and flower gardens that sprouted everywhere.

With time, some Canadians began to use the term world class to describe their institutions and activities. Toronto accepted a Finnish design for her new city hall, and staid old Ma Bell turned to a Spaniard to plan the galleria in BCE Place. The Banca Commerciale Italiana of Canada brought Italian talent to bear. Moshe Safdie created Habitat in Montreal, and he shared responsibility for the new Museum of Civilization in Quebec City with Quebec architects. Japanese inspiration spread across the country in the buildings of Raymond Moriyama.

All this was changing more than the streetscapes of the cities. To incorporate the traditions of the new peoples, Canada endorsed the concept of multiculturalism, a notion many long-established Canadians found an acceptable alternative to the idea of French-English bilingualism which had long been official policy of the national government. Multiculturalism produced more than street parties, costumes and national dances, infusing schools, social and religious institutions and creating tangible products of the new cultures coming to Canada.

In the same years that the children of immigrants from southern Europe were being born in the new country, peoples from other parts of the world fundamentally changed the nature of immigration. Chinese from Hongkong, the mainland and Taiwan, people from Viet Nam and other parts of Southeast Asia, families from Japan and Korea settled in large numbers. Their arrival was now not only a West Coast phenomenon but affected the rest of the country as well, so that Toronto's Chinatown, for example, is a huge and vibrant part of the city as a result. Turmoil in Africa and South America brought in many people, both as refugees and ordinary immigrants, and thousands upon thousands of people whose origin had been the Indian sub-continent flowed in to cities, towns and villages in every province.

Chinese Mall, Cawthra Road and Dundas Street, Mississauga, Ontario.

On the surface, Canada is a different country from that of Centennial year in 1967. The so-called visible minorities are less of a minority and more visible. The new people are just beginning to make their impact on the national heritage. As Ukrainians and Doukhobors first made do in homes and basements for the expression of their culture and religion, and went on to create magnificent churches, museums and even whole communities to join the earlier treasures of Canada, so we can find the most recent immigrants expressing themselves. The facades of traditional Anglican and United churches sport signs in Chinese or Korean for the new congregations that share the old buildings, while here and there a mosque adds minarets to the spires and onion-domes of earlier religious buildings. Old church buildings are remade into Buddhist temples as, a few generations ago, they had been converted into synagogues. In the secular area, no one would recognize the old Toronto Labour Lyceum in the brilliantly coloured and decorated up-scale Chinese restaurant it is today. In Calgary, a new Chinese community centre serves the new settlers and ornaments the city, and the Nikka Yuko Japanese Gardens, in Lethbridge, became a centennial project of Japanese-Canadian residents. Vancouver's Chinatown holds an authentic Chinese Garden, while a garden at the University of British Columbia is Japanese. At the other end of the country, in Dartmouth, a new Black Cultural Centre preserves the history of black people in Canada since the 1600s. Everywhere, East and West and North, native or aboriginal cultural centres celebrate and revive cultural traditions which were here before any of the new arrivals even thought of the new world.

All this has brought great wealth to Canada, a wealth sometimes hard to see as the country strains to recover from the worst economic reverse in fifty years. A decade ago that wealth was expressed in buildings, public and private, as great new edifices rose in city after city, to house government, museums, the performing arts, universities, business, and residences. Today, while there are still new ventures like the North York Performing Arts Centre, Canada's wealth is concentrating more on activity than display. A heavy investment in electronics brings her scientists and scholars into contact with their counterparts all over the world. The changing international economy impels Canadian businessmen and entepreneurs, large and small, to think and act in terms of world markets, world needs, and world standards. The end of the Cold War and the fulfilment of the threat of continual violence has plunged Canadians into the heart of vicious conflict on many continents, and has called on Canadians to rethink, renew and revise their traditional role as a major provider of peacekeepers for the United Nations.

In an unusual view of Toronto seen from the west, the density of the downtown core, with its high rises glowing with light, serves as a backdrop to the brilliant technology of the CN Tower and the Sky Dome.

The challenge for Canada is to achieve future growth with social and environmental justice. Noted throughout the world for their pursuit of these objectives, Canadians face the challenge of winning them domestically as well as helping others abroad achieve them. With the stability of tradition to provide a base on which to work, and the vitality, imagination and innovation of the people, new and old alike, there is every reason to expect them to do so. A hundred years from now, new, more diverse, and greater treasures will record that success

Newfoundland

In 1497, five years after Columbus' celebrated landfall in the Caribbean, John Cabot reached Newfoundland. He was almost certainly not the first European to see the island. Fishermen had known of the fabulous stocks on the Grand Banks for centuries. After 1500, the North Atlantic fishery became a vital source of food, and, when kings and governments thought in such terms, a nursery for seamen. The English, French, Portuguese, and Basques fought out their international rivalries off Newfoundland for over two centuries. Gradually, the English prevailed, though occasionally the French would reach out from their fortress at Placentia to wipe out every English settlement. The treaties of 1713 and 1783 finally guaranteed British sovereignty.

Settlement in Newfoundland not only had to survive in a rugged land and a harsh climate; it also had to outlast the hostility of successive British governments and the fishing industry. Early Newfoundlanders survived the denial of property rights, a judicial system run by the fishing captains, and, after 1729, a part-time governor. The few thousand people who endured this harsh and negligent regime cultivated a fierce independence and a commitment to their rock. By 1763, when Labrador was joined to Newfoundland as a territory administered by a governor, the colony numbered a bare 5,000 souls. In 1832, a population of 80,000 won grudging right to representative government; not until 1855 was the principle of responsible government conceded.

For most of the next century, Newfoundlanders struggled for prosperity — and independence. St. John's, one of North America's oldest settlements and finest harbours, sought and achieved the dignity of a commercial and a political capital. Its old seaport atmosphere still survives, although fires have devastated almost all the 19th-century buildings. The antagonism of outport fishermen against the Water Street merchants of St. John's became a political tradition, embodied in the pre-1914 growth of William Coaker's Fishermen's Protective Union.

But Newfoundland's efforts to define and control its own destiny were overtaken by world events. Hundreds of its finest young men perished on the Somme on the first day of July in 1916; Coaker's plans for the fishery disappeared in the postwar collapse of trade; the island's basic industries foundered in the world depression of the 1930s. Newfoundland surrendered its right of self-government to a British-appointed commision in 1934. Prosperity without self-confidence returned with the establishment of Allied bases during the Second World War, but in 1949, after two referendums, Newfoundland chose to become the tenth province of Canada.

A Newfoundland dory points out to sea at Goose Bay, Labrador.

Post-Confederation governments encouraged Newfoundlanders to haul up their boats and to seek prosperity in the abundant natural resources and the hydroelectric potential of their island and of Labrador. Then, for a while, governments looked on the sea as the province's greatest treasure, and the fishery revived for a while with new technologies and new safeguards. Beyond the fishery, with its shore-based packing plants and its improved ships, lies the prospect of offshore oil in reserves that may rival those of the Arabian desert. As the province looks to the second millenium, however, the promise of the fishery has receded again, with the stock of fish dwindling and more and more severe limitations on the annual catch seeming to come each year.

Nevertheless, nothing has ever allowed Newfoundland to escape its relationship with the sea. Inland, the reaches of forest and occasional mineral deposits have allowed islanders to diversify their livelihood, but nowhere except in the Avalon Peninsula and the Codroy Valley has the land proved hospitable to farming. A coastline of breathtaking beauty is a necklace of outports sheltered in every cove. Names such as Harbour Grace, Brigus, Fortune, and five hundred more are homes to Newfoundland's strongest tradition.

The sea has also shaped the people of Newfoundland, isolating them from the mainland and from each other, fostering diverse accents and beautiful survivals of the Irish and West Country dialects of the 18th century. Distances and self-sufficiency have conserved one of the richest heritages of folklore, folk music and song in all of North America. A tradition of performance and brilliant conversation has enriched the theatrical tradition of Canada.

Jutting boldly into the North Atlantic, the most easterly part of the North American continent, Newfoundland has brought an exceptional heritage to Confederation. The only province with a history as an independent nation, it has also brought to Canada people with extraordinary individuality of character and expression. What unites Newfoundland and its people is the sea. Placid or raging, smashing at the rocky coastline or heaving with deceptive softness beneath an enveloping fog, it has formed the land, the climate, and the people.

The quiet of dawn in the harbour of St. Johns.

EASTERN NEWFOUNDLAND

Avalon Wilderness Reserve

This is an internationally recognized reserve for the 5,500-animal Avalon woodland caribou herd, the most southerly of their kind in the world. The reserve is home to more than 3,500 moose, as well as beaver, muskrat, weasel, mink and other animals. The reserve also has six major salmon rivers, canoeing and hiking trails.

Bay du Nord Wilderness Reserve

One of the last major unspoiled areas in Newfoundland is rugged country, with wild rivers, boreal forests, bogs and barrens. The reserve is also an internationally recognized oasis for the estimated 15,000 woodland caribou that live here. It also contains the largest Canada goose habitat in eastern Newfoundland.

Bonavista

CAPE BONAVISTA. According to tradition, this is the point of land John Cabot sighted on his discovery voyage in 1497. A statue of Cabot stands near the lighthouse that was erected here in 1842. In the nearby town of Bonavista is a restored 19th century merchant's premises, the Mockbeggar property, a provincial historic site.

Brigus

The older part of the picturesque town is a national heritage community containing many fine old houses and gardens. The town's most famous son, Capt. Robert Bartlett, led the advance party that prepared the way for Admiral Robert Peary's dash to the North Pole in 1909. The community museum is housed in a stone barn that dates to the 1820's.

Burin

BURIN HERITAGE HOUSE AND HERITAGE II. This is perhaps the finest community museum in the province. The first building holds a permanent collection related to the settlement and heritage of the area. The second has a permanent display on the 1929 tidal wave that devastated the community.

Cape St. Mary's Ecological Reserve

Located near the community of St. Bride's, the reserve has one of the largest nesting gannet colonies in North America. The gannets nest atop Bird Rock, a sea stack only 15 metres from shore that rises 50 metres from the waterline. This is the most spectacular and most accessible of the province's more than 60 major seabird colonies. A new interpretation centre is planned in response to the colony's worldwide recognition.

Cupids

This tiny village on Conception Bay is where John Guy founded Newfoundland's first official colony in 1610. The colony lasted about 20 years.

Ferryland

Lord Baltimore founded the Colony of Avalon here in 1621 as a refuge from religious persecution. He later abandoned the colony in favour of a settlement in Maryland, a plan carried through after his death by his son. Excavation of buildings constructed during the early years of colonization is now under way.

Gander

AVIATION EXHIBITION. Located in the domestic passenger lounge at Gander International Airport, this exhibition celebrates early air pioneers. Because of its location, Newfoundland hosted many famous air pioneers on trans-Atlantic adventures. Four historic aircraft, including a World War II Hudson bomber, are on display in downtown Gander.

Grand Bank

SOUTHERN NEWFOUNDLAND SEAMEN'S MUSEUM. Grand Bank has long been a major fishing port, and the town contains the province's finest collection of Queen Anne style houses, which have more in common with the architecture of Halifax and Boston than they do with that of St. John's. The museum focuses on the men and ships who have worked in the fishery for centuries.

CAPE SPEAR. Only 16 km south of St. John's is the most easterly point in North America. Now a National Historic Park, the site features the oldest lighthouse in Newfoundland (1836), which has been restored to the 1840 era and fitted out as a lightkeeper's house. Near the tip of the cape are the remnants of World War II gunbatteries, built to guard against German submarine attacks on St. John's.

Grand Falls

BEOTHUCK PROVINCIAL PARK. This was an old-time logging camp in central Newfoundland. It features displays on the men and technology in early forestry operations.

MARY MARCH REGIONAL MUSEUM. Named for one of the last of the Beothucks, the museum's focus is the culture of the now extinct aboriginal tribe, North America's original red Indians who painted their bodies with ochre.

Harbour Grace

Once the second-largest community in Newfoundland, Harbour Grace's role in economic and cultural life was much diminished by a series of fires in the 19th and 20th centuries. The community has been settled since at least the early 17th century and was a major fishing port until well into this century.

CONCEPTION BAY MUSEUM. The museum is in the former Customs House, which itself was built on the site of 17th-century pirate Peter Easton's fort. One room is devoted to aviation pioneers.

HEART'S CONTENT, CABLE STATION. The site of the first successful trans-Atlantic telegraph cable is now a Provincial Historic Site. In 1866 the ship Great Eastern landed the cable here, and the undersea link provided vital telecommunications until it was supplanted by satelite technology in the 1960s.

Placentia

CASTLE HILL NATIONAL HISTORIC PARK. Placentia is the old French capital of Newfoundland, Plaisance. The first fort was built here in 1692, but in 1713 the area was ceded to the British under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht.

St. John's

Newfoundland's capital city, one of the oldest European settlements in North America, grew up around its almost-landlocked harbour. Protected form the stormy North Atlantic and easy to defend from attack by sea, the port was considered a major strategic prize during the colonial wars of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries because it lies close to shipping lanes and the Grand Banks, one of the world's most productive fishing areas until recent times.

Little is left of old St. John's. Three devastating fires in the 19th century wiped out virtually all the old buildings, but the city retains its seaport flavour. It is the major business centre, port, and seat of government.

ANGLICAN CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST. This splendid Gothic building designed by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1846 rises directly above the old part of the city and the harbour.

BOTANICAL GARDEN AT OXEN POND. Located in Pippy Park, the garden, a part of Memorial University and the only one of its kind, contains a display of Newfoundland heritage plants, is home to 126 species of birds, 26 species of butterfly, and 250 native plants. BOWRING PARK. A gift of the Bowring mercantile family, the park features waterfowl, a statue of Peter Pan cast from the same mould as its Kensington Park twin, memorials to the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, trails, a swimming pool, all done in a traditional English landscaping design.

COLONIAL BUILDING. Constructed in 1850, this was the seat of government in Newfoundland until 1960. It now houses the Provincial Archives. Its ceilings were painted by a convicted Polish forger who turned his talents to decoration in exchange for a lighter sentence.

COMMISSARIAT HOUSE. Constructed in 1821 for the Assistant Commissary General of the British garrison, the building has been restored with period furniture of the 1830 era.

GOVERNMENT HOUSE. The residence of the Lieutenant-Governor is set amid a park-like surrounding containing many trees rare to Newfoundland. The stone residence's most unusual feature is a moat which may have been intended to keep out snakes. There are no snakes in Newfoundland.

NEWFOUNDLAND FRESHWATER RESOURCE CENTRE. Located in Pippy Park, the Centre houses the only public fluvarium in North America. Visitors can see freshwater fish in their natural environment by looking through underwater windows.

NEWFOUNDLAND MUSEUM. The museum has two branches in St. John's: the main branch on Duckworth Street and the military and marine branch at the Murray Premises on Harbour Drive. The main branch houses two floors of displays related to Newfoundland and Labrador's pre-history, early European settlement, aboriginals and wildlife. There is also a main floor space devoted to travelling exhibits.

The Murray Premises is a restored mercantile property. Exhibits include maps, military uniforms and firearms, plans and models of fortifications, and a separate section on ships and shipping, including models, logs, navigation equipment and famous mariners.

PIPPY PARK. A large public park in northern St. John's, with cross-country ski-trails, fluvarium, botanical garden, golf course and varied terrain.

OLD GARRISON CHURCH. Also called St. Thomas Anglican Church, this was the place of worship for British troops stationed in St. John's prior to 1870. Built in 1836, it is the oldest existing church in St. John's.

QUIDI VIDI BATTERY. Overlooking the scenic fishing village of Quidi Vidi, this fort dates from 1762, when the French forces occupying St. John's built it in an unsucessful attempt to hold the port from the English. Later occupied by the British, it is now restored to the 1812 configurartion.

SIGNAL HILL NATIONAL HISTORIC PARK. In the days of sail, the arrival of ships from the various mercantile firms was signalled from atop the hill, hence its name. The hill provides a commanding view of the city and the coastline and is topped by Cabot tower, the city's most famous landmark, built in 1897 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of John Cabot's discovery voyage and the 60th year of Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne of England. On this hill Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic wireless signal in 1901. And here in 1762 the French and English fought the last battle of the Seven Years' War.

BASILICA OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST, OVERLOOKING ST. JOHNS. The huge Romanesque building is built in the form of a Latin cross, and holds a commanding position atop a hill overlooking the wooden houses in the older section of the city. Completed in 1955, it is built of Newfoundland and Irish bluestone and granite. It houses several examples of Neoclassical sculpture, including John Hogan's Dead Christ, and a statue of Our Lady of Fatima, which was presented by Portuguese fishermen who fished in Newfoundland waters for perhaps 500years.

TERRA NOVA NA TIONAL PARK, the oldest national park in the province, protects fjords and rugged coastline, and an interior area of boreal forest dotted with lakes and marshes. Whales are a common site offshore in early summer, while the estuary at the head of Newman Sound is famed for its ducks and unique intertidal zone.

TRINITY. This historic village is a living museum with some of the finest 19th century architecture in the province. St. Paul's Anglican Church, the Green family Forge, the Ryan premises and the Hiscock House museum are just some of the gems. The entire old town area is protected from unsuitable developments. The Trinity Museum houses documents that date to the 1600s. It was here in the late 1700s that the first