Little Bay Islands / Suley Ann Cove
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  • Suley Ann Cove

17 HEARNS RD
Little Bay Islands, A0J 1J0


Newfoundland Tourism Region : Central

Little Bay Islands, located in western Notre Dame Bay, is described in Wikipedia as a "Vacant town". For more information on this community, please go to the section on Little Bay Island and Petley''s Island.


Little Bay Island: Connected to Pilley's Island by ferry, as mentioned earlier, the community of "Little Bay Islands" which has recently been abandoned, however, originally "Little Bay Island" did not just refer to the one community it referred to five different islands of which Little Bay was the largest.

They included Little Bay Island, Mack's Island, Goat Island, Harbour Island, and Boatswain Tickle Island.

Little is known about each of the islands and how they got they names, but it is known that Mack's Island (which is connected to Little Bay Island by a bridge) was named after the community's first shop keeper, one can assume that Goat Island had goats, Harbour Island had a harbour and Boatswain Tickle Island had boatswains.

But what are boatswains, you ask? According to the DNLE, a boatswain is a type of bird. Quoted in the dictionary is the writings of Charles Wendell Townsend (1859-1934), a physician with a special interest in ornithology who published "Along the labrador Coast' in 1908 in which he wrote that "the jaegers, or hunters of the sea, called here 'bo'swains,' are very graceful, hawklike gulls".

A tickle, mentioned before, is a narrow stretch of saltwater, usually with hazardous tides, currents and rocks. The two communities on Little Bay Island are Little Bay Island and Sulian's Cove.

Little Bay Island: The following segment from the ENL, outlines community of Little Bay Island's early history:

The tradition is that the Beothuk predated English settlement. This is suggested both by such nearby place names as Indian Burying Place, Indian Tickle, and Indian Head, as well as by local archaeological evidence.

Permanent English settlement occurred about two years after the last known Beothuk was captured in 1823. It is likely, therefore, that most contacts occurred during the earlier period of temporary settlement.

One oral tradition affirms that a Mr. King, an Englishman who had settled at Round Harbour, took his family to the Island in the fall of 1805, only to have his boat and supplies taken by the Beothuk on his first night there.

Residents report that the first permanent English settler, a Budgell from Triton, arrived in 1825, but stayed only a few years. He was followed by John Campbell from St. John's, who became the first community leader.

Little Bay Islands is first recorded in the 1845 Census, with three families making up a population of 45... During the 1850s and 1860s the population increased rapidly as people moved in from the older settled areas of eastern Notre Dame Bay, such as Twillingate, Herring Neck and Tizzard's Harbour....

While most of the first settlers came to Little Bay Islands from the older populated areas of Notre Dame Bay, some may have come directly from Britain the 1884 Census records eight residents born in England and three in Scotland.

At one point Little Bay Islands had a population of approximately 500 citizens, but the cod fishing moratorium led to many of the residents leaving the "little islands" and moving to bigger communities such as Robert's Arm and Springdale, on the Island of Newfoundland.

The last of the permanent residents of Little Bay Islands voted in February 2019 to be "relocated" and nearly all of the remining 55 residents left by late December 2019.

The Census of 2016 revealed the magnitude of the population decline that happened over the past 10 years or so.

In 2011 there were 97 residents, in 2016 there were 71 (a 26.8% decline) to 2 that chose to remain on the island in 2020, after all the services were shut down.

Suley Ann Cove: Located on the western side of the Little Bay Islands, this community is one of very few place names that have a direct tie to the first Indigenous settlers of Newfoundland.

The name "Suley" is not an Indigenous word, rather it is the name of a Mi'kmaq who went by that name, and who was the first inhabitant in the cove. In this part of Newfoundland, a lot of native Indian artifacts have been found, giving evidence of Indigenous settlers long before the English arrived.

Nearby place names include Indian Burying Place, Indian Tickle and Indian Head.

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/LittleBayIslands



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