"These Poor Creatures Like Ourselves"

Abstract

Travel narratives, while complex and often contradictory, offer a tool for historians and cultural critics to explore the past and present of localized imperial peripheries and of the larger empires they are a part of. This author uses the travel writing of R.L. Dashwood, W.R. Kennedy, and J.G. Millais to discuss how European sport-hunting elites imagined Newfoundland and its inhabitants, and how they described them to readers throughout the empire. Through the exaggerations and fallacies of travel writers, who foregrounded their own ruggedness, manliness and self-sufficiency, are Indigenous guides, working-class settlers, and women who challenge established narratives in Newfoundland’s history, and without whom the travel writers could never have succeeded. The author investigates the depiction of these groups of Newfoundland residents in European travel writing to explore how their identities were shaped and reshaped in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, and calls for further re-examination of these groups as part of Newfoundland's historical narrative.