History Lecture with Dr. Jack Bouchard, Author of Terra Nova: Food, Water, and Work in an Early Atlantic World

In this talk, historian Jack Bouchard uses the experiences of three mariners who visited Terra Nova in the summer of 1542 to show how much of the history and experience of this overlooked corner of the Atlantic we can still recover. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, mariners from across Europe forged a vast seasonal fishery in the northwest Atlantic, centered on the waters in what is today eastern Canada. They called this floating colony Terra Nova and laid the foundation for a history of extracting food and fuel that extended into the twentieth century, and was at its height one of the largest European colonies in the Atlantic basin.