Some people contact travel advisors to join a tour, relax at a resort or book a cruise. Others may seek to satisfy a long-held curiosity, or experience a place that has always intrigued them, or return to a destination that holds special meaning. They are going on a personal quest.

To kick off an occasional series of stories about such trips, travel essayist and novelist Paul Theroux made a long-anticipated journey to Newfoundland to research an upcoming book. He sent his first impressions of the journey exclusively to Travel Weekly; the following essay, written in a highly personal style not typically found in our pages, reflects the essence of both the traveler and the destination.

It had always been my dream to see L’Anse aux Meadows, the Viking village on a pretty bay at the very top of Newfoundland, discovered relatively recently, in 1960, a place intensively studied, its foundations disinterred, the results both factual and speculative. 

It seemed to me an October day would be the best time to go, the autumn leaves brilliantly colored — every glorious tint of red and gold — driving all the way, with a ferry on the last leg, roughly 1,500 miles from my home on Cape Cod.

I set off, and after a night on midcoast Maine, I was driving north on the narrow coastal road, between the woods and the water, through the wetlands of Down East to the border crossing at Calais, Maine.

“Yes, we go across to St. Stephen [New Brunswick] — they have a Burger King,” a local Mainer told me at Calais’ Wabanaki Museum. “And they come over here — we have cheap gas. And once a year there’s the International Homecoming Festival, and a great parade back and forth across the border.”

Crossing the frontier myself, I presented my passport, assuring the guard that I did not have any firearms or drugs, and drove past St. Stephen to have a coffee in the small New Brunswick town of St. George (population 1,579). Two military bases nearby, closed in 1950, perhaps inspired the townsfolk to volunteer, and every lamppost — 50 or 60 on Main Street — memorialized a local son or daughter who’d died, most of them very young, with their portrait, the name of their St. George family and “Lest We Forget.”

Within an hour, I was in Saint John, famous for its high tides on the Bay of Fundy — wonderful to watch, but a 34-foot tide twice a day is tricky for someone like Bruce English of Rivers End Sportfishing, who launches his 24-foot Kingfisher to take people out to fish for sharks.

“We wait for the slack tide, and off we go — chum the water for porbeagle and makos. Catch ’em, take a picture, then throw ’em back.”

And he mentioned that a porbeagle shark, often mistaken for a great white, can be 12 feet long.

“I hunt, too — just got a moose,” Bruce said.

He was the first of a number of moose hunters I met on my trip. He’d gotten a permit in the moose hunt lottery and had shot a 600-pounder. “That meat will see me through the winter.”

A detailed description of a moose hunt during a wilderness trek in Henry David Thoreau’s book “The Maine Woods” is a corrective to anyone wishing to romanticize the death of this huge, harmless, nearsighted animal. (“Nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose.”) Yet Bruce claimed that the forests of New Brunswick are swarming with moose and that in a single season as many as 4,000 moose were killed.

“I don’t hunt,” David Smith told me the next day in Saint John. He was a Metepenagiag, of the Mi’kmaq Nation, born on the Red Bank Reserve in Miramichi and associated with a group called First Nations Storytellers.

In what was later called “the Sixties Scoop,” David — 1 year old — was taken from his parents and adopted by the Smith family. They renamed him — his birth name was Elton John Cloud — and raised him as their own. With a grim smile, David added, “To take the Indian out of me.”

After “some tough years” — of being bullied, of forced seclusion — he found peace in painting and writing, and solace in the wisdom of the elders on the reserve. “I never took the point of view of myself as a victim. That period made me what I am today: stronger” — and an advocate for the rights of Canada’s First Nations people and a fund of stories.

Resuming my trip north, I stopped at the inevitable Tim Hortons — Canada’s gathering place — this one in Moncton. Waiting for my order, chatting with a group of French-speaking retirees, they invited me to join them — New Brunswick is officially bilingual.

“Comment vous appelez-vous?” I asked the first man.

“Michel Bourgeois.”

“Quelle coincidence,” I said. “Je suis aussi un bourgeois!”

He laughed and introduced me to the four others at the table, and they described how in earlier times the French in New Brunswick, lacking education, mainly worked for the English.

“When you were building universities in the States, we were running for our lives,” a man named Louis said.

“He means the deportations,” Michel said, alluding to the forced expulsions by the English of the Acadians, from 1755 to 1778, to various distant places, including Louisiana, where they became Cajuns.

“We had to hide.” And when Louis said, “The Mi’kmaq Indians saved us,” I thought of the travails and the pride of David Smith.

In Moncton and elsewhere I asked Canadians if they’d been to Newfoundland, and most said, “Never.”

“What about Florida?”

“Many times,” was the usual reply.

Farther up the Trans-Canada Highway in Nova Scotia, a day’s drive and over the Canso Causeway to Cape Breton, I discovered I was in time for Nova Scotia’s Celtic Colours International Festival — a week of fiddling, strumming and singing. At the Celtic Music Interpretive Centre in the coastal village of Judique, I was familiarized with the styles of playing and its history.

That night at the Glenora Inn, I was privileged to listen for several hours to the fiddling of Kevin LeVesconte and the guitar of Neil McDaniel — effortless Gaelic syncopation that enlivened the room.

“When you’re short on everything else, you’ll make it up with music,” said Sandy MacIntyre, a renowned Cape Breton fiddler.

I’d been advised to drive the scenic Cabot Trail in Cape Breton, but I had a ferry to catch on the other side of the island, and I feared an eight-hour detour might cause me to miss it. So I drove east — the Trans-Canada Highway now reduced to a narrow country road — stopping at the First Nations town of Whycocomagh. There I met Stewart Basque, a Mi’kmaq elder, fluent in Mi’kmaq — learned from his parents.

“My parents didn’t go to school. That’s how they kept the language.”

I asked about his life on the Whycocomagh reserve.

He said simply, “I have what I want.”

I’d now been traveling for five days and arrived at North Sydney in the dark, creeping through backstreets to the Marine Atlantic ferry landing. I was given a numbered lane, and watched the 18-wheelers being loaded, then was finally waved up the ramp. A week before, I’d reserved my spot onboard and paid my $310 for a return trip — 96 miles across the Cabot Strait.

No cabin was available when I booked on the Ala’suinu (“traveler” in Mi’kmaq), though they’re comfortable and more desirable than the reclining chair in which I dozed for seven hours. I was awakened by a gong and directed to my car when we reached the windswept harbor at Channel-Port aux Basques. 

Though I didn’t eat anything onboard, I found a hearty breakfast of fish cakes at the Hotel Port aux Basques, and — it was still only 8 a.m. — drove the 136 miles north to the harbor city of Corner Brook.

I was now where I wanted to be, on a coastal road in mountainous landscape, among what I discovered to be friendly and hospitable people, on an island the size of the state of Virginia. But Newfoundland was a British colony until 1949, the year it became Canada’s 10th province.

Corner Brook was named by James Cook of Pacific fame. Cook did such a marvelous job charting the coast of Newfoundland over the course of five years he was charged with the task of observing and recording a rare event, the transit of Venus, in Tahiti in 1769. Cook
distinguished himself, navigating and charting islands and great portions of the Pacific in two subsequent voyages before being stabbed to death in a quarrel with Native Hawaiians.

At first sight unprepossessing, a community of bungalows, Corner Brook is an important city. Indeed, it is the only city on this west coast, home to a large hospital, a university, several schools and a large paper mill as well as, in winter, the ski resort at Marble Mountain. The headquarters of the Qalipu (“Caribou”) Band of the Mi’kmaq people is located across the road from Majestic Lawn, and the Mikwite’tm (“I Remember”) Garden (its plaque: “Built in honour of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across the country”).

The city lies at the head of the Bay of Islands, where I was escorted by Rob Thomas, kayaker and guide. It’s easy to see from the vastness of this bay, its dramatic islands and safe anchorages and harbors, why Corner Brook was important from the earliest times. Over 400 miles from the capital of St. John’s, it’s the commercial hub of western Newfoundland. In addition to the hospital, Newfies drive a hundred miles to buy socks in Corner Brook.

“My mother was born on the east coast, in a tiny coastal village called Great Harbour Deep,” Rob told me. “There was no road; they traveled by coastal boat for supplies or medical care. They didn’t have electricity until 1960.”

Many tiny Newfoundland communities became unsustainable, or too expensive to maintain with government funds. So Ottawa encouraged the villagers to vote for resettlement elsewhere, giving monetary grants as an inducement. Great Harbour Deep shut down, as did 300 other isolated communities in Newfoundland and Labrador. Around 30,000 people dispersed, Rob Thomas’ mother, Margaret, among them.

Another aspect of Corner Brook were its obvious new immigrants, the Sikh women serving in the restaurant of my hotel, the German woman at the coffee shop, the Vietnamese at the noodle restaurant, the Iranian desk clerk, Indians and Pakistanis, Filipinos and Hispanics, a significant number of Ukrainians and many other transplants — either because of the university or because of Newfoundland’s need for service workers. While traveling in Newfoundland, I read a New York Times piece about Canadian immigration and learned this astonishing fact: “One in five Canadians … [were] … born overseas.” 

These immigrants who arrived just yesterday sometimes bewilder Indigenous people, such as the Mi’kmaq, whose ancestry reaches back 4,000 years. (An earlier people in Newfoundland were the Beothuk, who were displaced and infected by germ-laden colonists and ultimately became extinct in 1829.)

“But we believe if two people are downtrodden, they help each other out,” Marcelle Williams told me at the Gros Morne Discovery Centre, where she was a guide, 80 miles up the coast near Woody Point. 

Marcelle was a Mi’kmaq (“Mi’kmaw” in her pronunciation) of the Qalipu Band, her real name Wape’k L’o’ls — White Rose. She described her upbringing in Lunenberg and St. Stephen and her geological studies as we hiked the nearby Tableland, steep yellowish mountains and deep valleys of rusted-looking peridotite rock so penetrated with heavy metals that nothing will grow there. The bareness of this extensive ridge and gorge, known as The Gulch, gave this vast open area an eerie bleakness that was unearthly, indeed lunar.

In addition to being the gateway to the glorious wilderness of Gros Morne, Woody Point is a coastal village where the arts thrive. It hosts a summer writers’ festival and year-round events, one of which I attended: an American writer Ron Whitehead reading his poetry and afterward a visiting band, playing rock and folk in the village hall.

Facing Woody Point across the Bonne Bay is Rocky Harbour, a lengthy drive around to the head of the bay and west again to what was, at that time in my trip, the windiest, rainiest, emptiest village I was to see. Not a soul about, the waves lashing the seafront and spilling over the breakwater.

“The lighthouse is very nice,” I had been told in Woody Point.

I pulled on my hooded rain gear, wearing gloves for the first time, put my head down and marched into the wind and driving rain in the direction of the picturesque Lobster Cove Head lighthouse. I might describe that structure, its singular charm in this stormy corner of Newfoundland.

But as I crept, bent double into the drizzle, the lighthouse faintly outlined on the headland, I passed St. Matthews Church and saw my first Rocky Harbour humans, five people sheltering from the storm, all of them smoking — a cigarette break.

I abandoned my miserable walk to the lighthouse and strolled to the church, where I introduced myself as a visitor from their neighbor to the south. They greeted me warmly, they apologized for the weather, and Brenda Shears told me how Rocky Harbour was famous for rum-running, bringing fish to the States and the Caribbean and returning with alcohol onboard. Her uncle Bill Shears from Parson’s Pond up the coast, added detail, “It was during Prohibition,” he said. And the other smokers chipped in too, making it companionable — a happy gathering for a traveler wishing to understand a remote village.

“Is there a service inside the church?” I asked at one point.

“My mother’s wake,” Brenda said. “She died two days ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“She was 96; she had a good life.”

“She was one of 16 children,” Bill said.

Brenda said, “Funeral’s tomorrow — you’d be welcome.”

“I was thinking of driving to L’Anse aux Meadows.”

“It’s not a bad drive — you could be there and back in a day.”

The following morning dawned sunny and warm — the first day of full sunshine I’d seen since arriving in Newfoundland, auspicious for a traveler on a mission.

I drove up the coast to Port au Choix, where I had an early lunch at the Sea Echo cafe — delicious pan-fried cod — chatting to Willard and Boyd, two middle-aged fishermen who reminded me it was Thanksgiving Day in Canada and this was our feast.

They were just out of the forest, having spent the previous week hunting moose — they’d bagged three, one of them a 1,000-pound bull — and disclosed some fascinating facts: There are no raccoons, foxes, skunks or porcupines in Newfoundland, and there were no moose until they were introduced in 1904.

“What’s the biggest change you’ve seen here in your lifetime?” I asked.

“The road,” Boyd said.

“It was a dirt road until 50 years ago,” Willard said. “We traveled by coastal boat from harbor to harbor, all the way to Corner Brook.”

“How’s the fishing?”

Lobstermen rarely boast, but Boyd said flatly, “One day last summer I had 3,000 pounds of lobster onboard. One day’s catch.”

After dessert — chocolate cake — I resumed driving, another 140 miles, along the coastal Viking Trail, with a glimpse of Labrador across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, then east through the woods and glacial kettle ponds across the top of the island, and north past Noddy Bay, arriving in the late afternoon to find the Visitor Center closed. I didn’t mind. I had the whole vista to myself.

Grassy knolls sloped to the sea, with earthworks and the restored suggestions of habitations visible, a sheltered cove, a safe anchorage for a Viking longship, and a thousand years ago there had been forests here, plenty of wood for building a boat or framing a sod hut, enough fish and seals for Leif Erikson to consider it a permanent settlement. But he set sail with his crew that included women and children, leaving the huts behind and not much else — oh yes, a bronze ring-headed pin — and enough drama and experience to enlarge the sagas that celebrated the voyages.

My destination achieved, in the failing light I climbed into my car and headed south for home.