Passing the ancestral torch: newfoundlanders pay homage to the resilient Acadian community, while recovering their French Heritage.

• Author: Wyels, Joyce Gregory

If the residents of tile Port-au-Port Peninsula, Newfoundland, are ringing out the old year and ringing in the new with extra fervor, their joie de vivre is well founded.

For one thing, the celebrations mark the end of an extraordinary year--a commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of l'Acadie Francaise, the first French settlement in North America. In 2004, festivals reverberated throughout New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and especially Nova Scotia, where the third Congres Mondial Acadien welcomed distant relatives to their ancestral home. What's more, the new year promises more milestones in the saga of a people who rebounded from a dizzying round of deportations and new beginnings to reclaim their place in history.

In Newfoundland, part of Canada's Atlantic province of Newfoundland-Labrador, the official anniversary observances took a somewhat different tack. This very anglophone island traces its history to John Cabot, (Giovanni Caboto, sailing for England), who explored these shores in 1497, and Humphrey Gilbert, who claimed the island for England in 1583.

"In Newfoundland we were so cut off from the rest of the population--even the Acadians--that we don't have the same traditions," says Robert Cormier, co-chair of Newfoundland's 2004 Society. He points out that Newfoundland has been a part of Canada only since 1949. "Some of us are Newfoundlanders, not Canadians."

Nevertheless, even a casual glance at the map suggests an early French presence in Newfoundland. All along the deeply serrated coast, where today only English is spoken, French names--Baie Verte, Isle aux Morts, Fleur-de-Lys--encircle the island. Perhaps even more telling are those names that started out French (for example, Havre de Grace, Toulinguet, Isle Rouge) and now read Harbour Grace, Twillingate, and Red Island.

"We were not trying to steal the show," says Francoise Enguehard, executive director of the Societe 2004. "But in fact there's been a French presence in Newfoundland for at least five hundred years." In her office overlooking Water Street in St. John's, she pulls out a sheaf of documents. "The French were extremely organized," she says, leafing through photocopied archives of the French fisheries off the shores of Newfoundland. "They had to be precise because if there was a war they had to be able to call the fishermen into service. Also, the men were paid according to how much they fished." Noting that the ships were required to register in the nearby islands of St.-Pierre-et-Miquelon, she traces a list of individual sailors--from Thomas Hubert, who sailed from Dieppe in 1508, to Jean Denis, from Honfleur, Normandie, in 1506, to a fisherman named Bergeron, also from Honfleur. The year: 1504.

It was the plentiful cod in the waters off Newfoundland--"so thick," according to one account, "that you could scoop them up in a basket"--that attracted Basque fishermen as well as the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English to the Grand Banks off what is now Canada's eastern most province. The Basques, some say, followed Viking sea routes that led to the islands and mainland of North America. Jacques Cartier, who explored these coasts in 1534--and claimed them for France--mentions already-established communities with French names. Says Enguehard, "That didn't happen overnight." A chronicler who sailed with Gilbert counted "an hundred or more sails of ships" fishing here, belonging to "the Portugals, and French chiefly."

Apart from the place names, little evidence remains of the men who fished seasonally and dried their catch on the coasts of Newfoundland or the small islands off-shore. Still, what Frenchman could exist for long without his bread? Many a village conceals the remains of an ancient oven, a four a pain, just below ground level. "You don't have to dig very far," says Enguehard. "When we excavated traces of those old ovens, we were digging for our history."

On St. John Island, a tiny island opposite the west-coast town of Port-au-Choix, Stella Mailmans scrapes away the dirt to unearth a few bricks. "The fishermen would have had to bring the bricks...