Table Mountains

Extract from the diary of William E. Cormack who walked across the island of Newfoundland in 1822. Here's an entry when he visited Cape Ray.

November 29th. -- Cape Ray. -- Having slept the previous night in the winter house of one of the families at Little Cod Roy river, we to-day walked round Cape Ray, here leaving the French Shore and entering upon American Newfoundland, or that division of the coast on which the Americans have a right of fishing and of drying their fish. On the shore north of Cape Ray lay several wrecks of ships and their cargoes of timber. Cape Ray is a low point formed of dusky coloured trap rock, intersected in some places with vertical strata of green trap, running in an east and west direction. The coal formation of St. George's Bay adjoins. On the very Cape there resides during summer a person of the name of Wm. Windsor, with his family. We found him in his winter hut in a spruce wood two or three miles to the eastward of the Cape. The most perfect contentment, cheerfulness, poverty, and hospitality were the characteristics of the monarch of Cape Ray. His resources, through the means of fishing, enabled him to procure a sufficiency of coarse biscuit, molasses, and tea, by which, together with fowling, he supported his family. He wore no covering on his head, even when exposed to the inclement weather -- Nature, aided doubtless by habit, providing him with an extraordinary mat of hair, as she does the inferior animals here with fur. The high lands of Cape Ray lie several miles inland, north-east of the Cape, and consist of a group of granite mountains seemingly nearly two thousand feet in height. The scenery among them is sublime; the steep sides of the wedge-shaped valleys appear smooth and striped at a distance, owing to the crumbled rocks and blocks detached by frost being hurled from the very summits to the bottom, where they lie in heaps of ruins. I had reluctantly to behold only the treasures laid open to the mineralogist. Snow and ice lie in beds on these mountains all the summer. The vicinity of Cape Ray is remarkable for great numbers of foxes, induced here by the abundance of their chief food, viz, the berries of the vaccinium or partridge berry and that of the vaccinium or hurtle berry. We were several days storm-stayed by winds and snow, and the inefficiency of the ice to bear us across the rivulets, at a boat harbour called the Barasway, six or seven miles east of the Cape. The person in whose winter house we here stopped, his summer residence being at Port au Basque at the eastward, had now entrapped and shot about eighty foxes, black, silver gray, patch, and red, in less than two months; all those colours are produced at one litter. The foxes are mostly caught in iron spring-traps, artfully concealed (not baited) in the path-ways along the seashore. It may be noticed that on the west coast of Newfoundland, there is neither Scotchman, Irishman, nor rat to be met with; nor, it is said, has any member of these European families taken up an abode west of Fortune Bay.
My father,grandfather,great grandfather was born in the area where Cormack described the settler William Windsor.A point there bears the name Windsor point and if not for Cormacks diary i doubt if many would know of him.The scenery Cormack describes never changed,the partridge berries are still abundant and some of the locals still trap foxes.About 80 years or so ago the last local gave up having both a winter and summer home at or near Cape Ray.I stll think sometimes it takes a tough breed of people to live here,but not as tough as Windsor who almost 200 years ago became the first.A millenium Before Windsors time the dorset eskimo made it their home and disappeared leaving us to wonder why?I myself keep a journal of daily life and shoot many photographs of the community.I hope in many decades to come all my efforts can help someone(hopefully living in Cape Ray)to decipher much easier what life was all about here. Happy New Year!