Litus Ignotus: Lost coasts of Terra Nova in the sixteenth century

Abstract

What do we do with coasts that have been lost? What are we to do with places and stories large and small which once embodied the lived experience of life and work on the fishing coats of North America? This essay, following the work of the historian John Gillis, explores lost coasts from the sixteenth-century European fishery in the northwest Atlantic, a place known as Terra Nova to the mariners who went there. The essay dwells upon imagined islands, missing harbours, enigmatic fortifications and other places that existed in the earliest years of the fishery but which have since disappeared. In so doing, it shows how coasts can change and be lost over time, and how historians can try to recover these unknown shores.