Rare documents on Cupids featured at The Rooms

An exhibition of artifacts and documents dealing with the history of English settlement in Newfoundland in the 1600s, "Here to Stay: Cupids 1610," is open at The Rooms. The museum event was officially launched following a reception Thursday evening. It is set to remain open to January 2011.

"It's just astonishing how much has been done and how absolutely excellent it all is," said CEO of The Rooms Corp., Dean Brinton, taking the podium in front of about 200 to 250 people. Brinton introduced, among others, curator of archeology and ethnology at The Rooms provincial museum, Kevin McAleese.

"We have some very special navigation and fishery artifacts on display as well as a construction model of the good ship Indeavour, a small sailing ship built by John Guy's people," McAleese said, describing the contents of the displays.

There are also the words of settlement leader John Guy himself. "His journal entries, letters and printed newsletters describing the life of the colony provide an eye witness account of Englishmen becoming Newfoundlanders," the curator said.

Some of the documents on display are on loan from international collections from Brown University in Rhode Island and from the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

"Some of those priceless documents on loan from England and the U.S.A. describe the ways and means of the fishery and the risk that was involved in it. And by risk, ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking pirates. Not the Hollywood silver screen kind of pirates, but the real honest-to-God pirates who harassed and stole from English fishers and their European colonies with armed ships and men who fought with cannon and musket and sword to take all they could and give nothing back," McAleese said.

For example, a "Petition to Put Down Piracy," from 1620, holds a complaint about piracy in Conception and Trinity bays.

"The other book that deals with Cupids - we often say, 'Oh, it was the first (settlement), or it was early on,' but there's an actual book published in the early 1600s, in 1628, that clearly says people are still living here 20 years after they first started," he said. "So it starts to gives us some chronology in addition to the archeology."

The displays received a nod from the chairman of the board of directors for Cupids 400 Inc., Roy Dawe. Even so, he called it a sample of what Cupids has available for those interested in the history.

"That's a wonderful exhibit. I'm totally impressed, but that's a teaser," he said. "It's all about Cupids and it's all about what happened in 1610, but at the Cupids Legacy Centre - which by the way is now open for public admissions - you will see how the 1610 colony actually progressed and how the whole English culture (here) developed from the 1610 colony."

Dawe said Cupids 400 events are hitting full stride following the opening of exhibits in Winterton and Dildo, the opening of the Cupids Legacy Centre and the scheduled start of the Muses and Minstrels cultural festival July 2.

afitzpatrick@thetelegram.com

• 
• 
" />


" />

" />





















• View the gallery