In 1609, teenage Basque girls caught up in one of France’s largest witch hunts were said to have confessed to flying across the sea to hold demonic Sabbath gatherings in Newfoundland.
Perched atop the masts of fishing vessels, they supposedly poisoned the catch laid out to dry below them and stirred up storms to sink the fleet.
For sixteenth-century Europeans, the volatile seas and vast wilderness of Newfoundland and Labrador must have seemed like a perfect haven for witches, and when they arrived on these shores, sailors from England, Ireland, Scotland, the Channel Islands, France and Portugal brought a wealth of witch lore along with them.
The belief in witches and folk magic persisted in the province until well into the 20th century, especially in communities with primarily English roots. Instead of sowing discord, though, it actually encouraged co-operation.
A fisherman might run aground on a reef, or lose his gear overboard, or pull up one empty net after another and suspect he’d been the target of a spell.
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On land, a workshop’s machinery might break down, the roof might blow off a house, or a family’s livestock might sicken. In the most dire cases, family members themselves might suffer injuries, miscarriages, or even death under a witch’s curse.
But witches in Newfoundland and Labrador didn’t strike at random. Normally, their spells or “wishes” were retribution against those who had wronged them.
In her book Making Witches: Newfoundland Traditions of Spells and Counterspells, folklorist Barbara Rieti describes a woman on the Northern Peninsula who went from door to door during the Great Depression asking for food, clothing and tobacco.
One winter, a local man refused to give her the pan of flour she had requested.
“That’s OK,” she told him. “You’ll be sorry before the fall.”
In this 1896 engraving from The Devil in Britain and America, a witch calls up a storm to sink a ship. (The Wellcome Collection)
That spring, his cod trap was crushed by ice and his trawl lost at sea. He caught only a fraction of the fish he needed to see his family through the next winter.
By October, he was so desperate he was the one borrowing flour from a neighbour, but instead of using it himself, he gave it to the woman he had previously turned away.
“Bless you, my son,” she said then. “You’ll have plenty after this.”
Within a week, he was offered a winter job at the Grenfell Mission’s lumber mill in Roddickton that paid enough not only to put food on his family’s table but to cover the bills he had accrued over the summer besides.
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The tale follows the typical pattern of N.L. witchcraft stories.
Someone who rebuffed a request for help or forgot to pay a debt they owed would find themselves the victim of inexplicable bad luck, seemingly the supernatural doing of their disgruntled neighbour.
Once a person was witched, the curse could be broken either by righting the wrong that had been done or by casting a counterspell.
Popular methods included drawing the witch’s blood or driving a nail into their path. If the witch’s identity was unknown, shooting a drawing of a crow or boiling a bottle of urine could make the culprit so sick they’d be forced to reveal themselves.
The wise staved off trouble by placating the local witch before any new venture.
In 1904, Dr. Edward Rutherfurd, a Scottish doctor who practised in Bonavista, wrote in his diary that a nearby outport was home to “a modern witch of Endor” whose blessing was considered essential for a successful seal hunt.
“Some of the captains, even, make it a point before sailing, to lay at her feet votive offerings of sugar, tea and other modern substitutes for the classic burnt offerings of rams and turtle doves.”
There was a pattern, too, to the type of person who earned a reputation for witchcraft.
Jerseymen were believed to sail home for the weekend on coal grates, which were riddled with holes, much like European witches were thought to sail in sieves. Mezzotint by Charles Turner after John James Halls, 1807. (The Wellcome Collection)
Unlike in some other parts of the world, Newfoundland and Labrador’s witches weren’t often traditional healers. Someone could practise midwifery, cure warts with the laying on of hands, or even tell fortunes without automatically being presumed to be a witch.
What N.L.’s witches did have in common was that they tended to be either women or ethnic outsiders.
When Mi’kmaq visited white-majority communities to sell baskets or furs, residents bought the wares eagerly, but not always out of need. Some were afraid to say no for fear they’d be hexed.
Jerseymen — men from the island of Jersey in the English Channel — were also believed to have magical powers.
Merchants and seasonal workers who came to Newfoundland for the fishery but never settled here, Jerseymen supposedly spent their weekends at home. They could cross the Atlantic overnight by transforming themselves into seals or sailing at uncanny speeds using a coal grate for a ship.
It’s difficult to know what these so-called witches thought of the label.
Newfoundland and Labrador had no witch trials where the testimonies of accused witches were committed to paper. For centuries, permanent settlement was officially discouraged, so rural outports were subject to little government oversight.
Instead of being a prosecutable offence, witchcraft promoted community cohesion in areas without law enforcement.
Isolated in small communities with limited resources, rural Newfoundlanders and Labradorians had to rely on each other to survive. Thinking someone could bewitch you if you mistreated them was a reason to help all your neighbours, even the ones you didn’t particularly like.
As Rieti writes, “witch tradition grew out of the intense interdependence that made outport life possible.”
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