Fogo Island (Newfoundland and Labrador)

It lies off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, northwest of Musgrave Harbour across Hamilton Sound, just east of the Change Islands.

The Bertius map from 1606 shows Fogo Island as one of only about a dozen important features around the coast of Newfoundland.

Local oral history indicates that Tilting was originally a French harbour before becoming a venue of Irish settlement.

This is highly likely, given the traditional commercial and cultural links between southern Irish and northern French fishing ports.

Beothuk traversed Fogo Island for many hundreds of years before Irish and English settlers arrived.

Fogo Island first attracted Europeans because of the extensive opportunities for commodity harvesting, including seal skins and oil, lumber, fur-bearing animals, salmon and of course cod.

Over time, settlers on the island concentrated on processing dried cod, mainly because that was the product that most interested the merchants who dealt in the region of Fogo.

Today, the Fogo Island Cooperative continues to successfully stake footholds in new fish markets.

In 1967, the island played a key role in the development of what came to be known as the "Fogo Process," a model for community media as a tool for addressing community concerns, when an Extension field worker from Memorial University, Fred Earle, and Colin Low shot 27 films with Fogo Islanders as part of the National Film Board of Canada's Challenge for Change program.

[3] Residents defeated the Smallwood government's plans to resettle elsewhere Fogo Islanders in the 1950s but by 1967 a downturn in the inshore fishery had forced many to turn to welfare support.

The last physician was due to leave the island in June 2022; medical care then only being available via a six-hour round trip by ferry, weather permitting.