At the Peace Garden

It is always a surprise and a thrill to find artwork well away from roads and buildings.

This picture is looking up through the Peace Monument at the site of a meeting between English colonists and Beothuk local people in 1612. They all enjoyed each others' company, singing and dancing together and making plans for the next year.

The Peace Monument is the shape of the frame of a Beothuk wigwam. It sits on what is called Frenchman's Island, joined to the mainland of Newfoundland by a tiny beach. At low tide today, we walked there over that three- or four-metre-wide beach.

The water around it -- an inlet of Trinity Bay -- was named Truce Sound in 1612, in honour of the peaceful meeting. The name never stuck -- the arm was later called Bull Arm (probably for the walruses found in the early years of European exploitation there). But the "Truce" name is retained in the name of the trail we walked to get there, Truce Sound Trail and Peace Garden.

In the 1600s, that truce itself did not hold either. A long period of enmity developed, with two centuries of impoverishment, alienation, ethnic cleansing, and murder of the Beothuks. Culturally (and by most reports entirely) the Beothuk were no longer in existence by the mid-19th century. A very sad story.

And "Why," you might ask, "is it called Frenchman's Island?"

At the end of the 1600s, the French military used the island as a temporary prison for Englishmen they had captured in Trinity Bay. Those prisoners were being transported overland to the French territory in Placentia Bay. That was just five or ten kilometres south but over difficult terrain. This was a well-hidden winter home for the French forces.

The site was dug by archaeologists about fifteen years ago and today a permanent commemorative marker is under the wigwam frame.

The marker does not say who made the monument except that it was a joint work by residents of the nearby community of Sunnyside and Heritage Canada.