Possible Maps: Newfoundland, 1763–1829

Abstract Islands have a disproportionate role – as strategic locations, as imaginative or symbolic locales, as extractive zones and as ecological bellwethers – in oceanic imperial histories. They were and are places of ‘great practical use and metaphorical power’. And yet Newfoundland was seen (and continues to be seen) as marginal and peripheral, even if the biomass that was pulled out of its ocean fed – quite literally – a global network of exploitation. This article uses four overlapping maps to tell four overlapping stories: James Cook’s circumnavigation of the island in 1763–8; Lt David Buchan’s trek into the interior to contact the Beothuk in 1811 and 1820; William Eppes Cormack and Joseph Sylvester’s trek across the island in 1822; and finally, a series of story-maps created by Shanawdithit, who is apocryphally known as ‘the last of the Beothuk’. In doing so, it draws in Indigenous ‘storywork’ and cartographic histories and makes a case for storytelling as powerful methodology for examining overlooked colonial histories. These maps and stories highlight the complexity of encounter with a place rather than a coherence of colonial ideologies. Through the stories these maps help me tell, I hope to show how the peripheries of some people’s empires were the centres of other people’s worlds.