Boulder Books“William Eppes Cormack is celebrated for his walk across the interior of the island of Newfoundland in 1822 and for his involvement with the Beothuk: his collection of information about Beothuk history and culture and his attempts to prevent their extinction,” author Ingeborg Marshall writes in her Introduction. “Although he is a central figure in Newfoundland’s history, surprisingly little is known about Cormack’s life.
Marshall starts with his parents: Alexander Cormack , who came from Scotland to St. John’s in 1782, and “who was, to use the Scottish term, ‘canny’” and was soon a member of the merchant elite, and Janet McAuslan , whose family had moved to St. John’s from Glasgow. “While his 1824 ‘Account of a Journey’ had little immediate impact, perhaps at that time travels through the wilderness by one or two men with a guide were not particularly rare, but for many years to come Cormack’s map remained a key source of information about the geography and geology of Newfoundland’s southern interior.”Cormack’s sympathies and concerns for the “sylvian” Beothuk were genuine, but paternalistically of his time .
“Admittedly a colonial imposition from the arsenal of Christianizing tools brought by Moravian missionaries, this tradition of choral and instrumental music would become a beloved symbol of community, a vehicle for spiritual and aesthetic expression, and, perhaps ironically, an instrument for Inuit agency,” Tom Gordon, former director of Memorial University’s school of music and relief organist at the Nain Moravian Church, states in his preface.
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