Long before anyone called it Woods Island, this bay had a name.
The Mi'kmaq knew these waters as Elmastukwek, and they knew them long before any of the rest of us came looking. They moved through the bay with the seasons — fishing, hunting, gathering what the woods and the water gave up — following a rhythm that had nothing to do with property lines or trading posts or anyone's idea of ownership. People crossed this water, camped on it, lived off it, long before a ship from Europe ever came looking for it. This was never empty country. It only looks that way to people who arrive expecting a blank page, and the Bay of Islands was never that.
The first outsiders to work these waters came for one reason, and it wasn't the scenery. It was fish. Basque fishing crews were working this coast from as early as the late 1500s — men who crossed an entire ocean every spring in wooden ships, worked the summer through, and sailed home again before the ice came back. It was brutal, seasonal, unglamorous work: haul the cod, split it, salt it heavy enough to survive the crossing home, and do it again the next year. They weren't here to settle. Most of them never intended to see a Newfoundland winter at all. For the better part of a century, that was the entire relationship between Europe and this bay — a long-distance one, conducted almost entirely in salt and cod, with nobody staying behind when the ships left.
What kept them coming back to a harbour like this one wasn't sentiment. It was shelter. A bay ringed by mountains, calm water tucked in behind the point, a place to anchor a ship and dry a catch without the open Atlantic tearing it apart — that was worth crossing an ocean for, season after season, even if nobody thought to call it home.
By the late 1600s, the French had gone a step further, setting up more permanent fishing stations along this coast — shore camps built to last a season rather than a summer, with flakes for drying cod strung along the beach and small crews staying longer than the Basque ever had. Woods Island's sheltered harbour would have been known and used by then, a reliable stop in a working coastline, even if nobody was wintering there yet. Ships still came with the season and left with it. The island itself stayed quiet through the cold months — familiar to the men who fished these waters, useful to them, but not yet anyone's home.
That would take another hundred years.
We didn't invent this bay. We just picked up a piece of what was already here — a place that had a name, and a use, and a purpose, long before it had ours.