Hickman's Harbour: Taking a spur road north one comes to Hickman's Harbour.

It is believed that this harbour was named for Jonathan Hickman, who worked as a pilot for Captain James Cook in 1770 when he surveyed the eastern coast of Newfoundland.

Hickman was also believed to have worked as a pilot for the British Army officer James Wolfe, went he travelled from Louisburg to Quebec in 1759.

Major General Wolfe is best known for his victory in 1759 over the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City. According to the articles in Decks Awash on the island's history, Hickman was accompanied by his wife "who bore him a child in the vicinity of the place now known as Hickman's Harbour".

According to Wikipedia contributors, by 1900, Hickman's Harbour was the site of the best deep-water anchorage on the island, and so become the centre of the Random Island fishing and shipbuilding industries.

Other methods of employment include sawmilling and slate mining, though the actual quarry was across the sound in Nut Cove. By 1901 Hickman's Harbour was the most populous community on Random Island with 309 people.

The combined population for Hickman's Harbour and Robinson's Bight in 2016 was 379, showing a 5.7% decrease from the 402 recorded in 2011. From Decks Awash comes this bit of "local lore":

Gold? Buried treasure? A lot of small communities have fanciful tales of buried treasure.

Hickman's Harbour is not to be outdone. Nobody knows whether the treasure is Spanish "dubloons" captured in a great sea battle by Newfoundland's pirates Kelly, Peter Easton, or Henry Mainwaring.

Or whether dome poor devil stole the ship's poke while moored at Trinity and fled south, ditching his loot before he was caught red-banded.

In any case, the gold is supposed to be buried on the south side of the harbour on land that used to belong to an old widow. She died in the 1940s, and the land was bought by Willis Martin.

Harold Horwood talked with some of Willis' neighbours in 1954 and they claimed he bought the land just to find the treasure. Well, he had a fellow come out from St. John's with a metal detector and they didn't find anything. But metal detectors were pretty primitive back then. Now... with computer age technology...?

Britannia: From the Random Academy website one learns that the "inhabitants on the Smith Sound side of the island, at Petley, Britannia and Lower Lance Cove, were also engaged in the Labrador fishery and sawmilling, while others were employed by the slate quarrying business of the Carrie family - with headquarters at Britannia, although the quarry itself was across the Sound, at Nut Cove.

The Nut Cove quarry was closed in 1907 (it was reopened in 1990) and a smaller slate quarry at Hickman's Harbour closed in 1910". Why the town was given the Roman name for Britain remains a mystery to the research team.

Used with permission from "Uncovering the Origin of 1001 Unique Place Names in Newfoundland and Labrador" 2021 Jennifer Leigh Hill

Address of this page: http://nl.ruralroutes.com/HickmansHarbour