Tourist Outpost

On Newfoundland's west coast, silvery Atlantic salmon were running in a score of rivers. The big ones picked the lordly Humber. Last week, U.S. sportsmen were heading in to try the Humber's limpid pools. On the more popular of Newfoundland's 108 major salmon rivers, cabins were booked solid. (Cost: $25 a day for board, room, canoe and guide).

For men & women who come for the summer fishing, or for the fall hunting (partridge, duck, caribou, moose), Newfoundland has long been an unspoiled sportland. This year--Newfoundland's first as a Canadian province--thousands of tourists who want neither to fish nor hunt will view the magnificent scenery of the island (42,734 sq. mi.) and get a glimpse of the picturesque life of its people (pop. 328,000).

By Sea & Air. Last week some visitors were crossing Cabot Strait, 100 miles by ferry to Port aux Basques, where they took the 547-mile-long narrow-gauge railway to the capital city of St. John's (pop. 56,000). Others flew to Gander Airport. Still others sailed through the narrow channel that leads to St. John's landlocked harbor.

Tourists eat well in Newfoundland. The main fare is steak, lamb, salmon or lobster, but there are also such piquant island specialties as seal-flipper pie, smoked caplin (a smeltlike fish), fried cod tongues, and gamy saltwater bird. For dessert, there are blueberries, tart partridge berries, and amber-hued bakeapple berries, topped with thick cream. Strictly for strong stomachs is the Sunday morning breakfast of fish and brewis (boiled hardtack) with pork cracklings.

Caplin & Squid. The newly formed Sight-Seeing Tours Co. runs trips to Newfoundland's characteristic fishing villages --clusters of houses and sheds clinging to sheer cliffs. Harvey & Co. Ltd. has a tour that takes in coves where, in summer, shoals of the glistening caplin strike, and where dorymen with multi-hooked jiggers catch squid for bait for the Grand Banks fishing fleet. At tour's end, 40 miles from St. John's, is trim little Cupids, the beauty spot picked by John Guy in 1610 for the first permanent colony.

To get to most of the outport fishing hamlets or to Labrador, the sea is the main highway. Sturdy little coastal boats and black-hulled schooners sail in & out of deep fiords and past bold escarpments.

Hotels & Highways. Newfoundland has a long way to go before it can accommodate large numbers of tourists at reasonable rates. It needs to build more roads and to finish and pave a cross-country highway. It needs a car-ferry on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and many more modern hotels, inns and cabins.

In its isolation the island has been as unheedful of tourists as it has been unspoiled. It has an atmosphere as singularly its own as the soft-spoken mixture of Irish brogue and Scottish burr heard in the outports where the toast is likely to be "I bows taward ye." In its quiet, trim little seaside hamlets, with their gaudy-hued houses and limed picket fences, the sightseeing visitor can get a thrill of discovery to match the sportsman's strike in the Humber's pools.

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